“... With the Contras, describing Fidel in Managua in 1980: Fidel Castro was in Managua the week Ronald Reagan was nominated in Detroit. He was the grand man of the celebration. He was holding court, it seemed as you watched him, among his children. There he stood at the big reception in the Casa de Gobierno, his trademark cigar in his hand, an ...”

“... or, indeed, overinterpret them. His long, justly celebrated essay on the movie career of Ronald Reagan, his analysis of The Birth of a Nation and his meditations on Cold War anti-Communist movies are characterised by their lucidity, invention and historical depth. He locates the origins of The Jazz Singer a century before the movie’s ...”

“... he is also being reactionary. He sounds like one of those paranoid pamphleteers against the man Ronald Reagan unfailingly called ‘Nikolai Lenin’. Lenin, incidentally, also couldn’t believe the news that the German Social Democrats had voted for the war – a truly vertiginous moment in modern history – but if you go on mentioning the number of ...”

“... the only reason,’ he grinned. ‘But it didn’t entirely work. After a White House screening, Ronald Reagan walked up to me and said: "Great movie. Great man. Just like his daughter."’ To recapitulate briefly: Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of postcolonial India, had a daughter, Indira, who married a Parsi called Feroze Gandhi. They had ...”

“... Clifton White, the political strategist who engineered the Goldwater nomination in 1964) had hoped Ronald Reagan would be the nominee, the party quickly coalesced around Nixon, who sailed to victory in the primaries. He was no one’s idea of a dream candidate. He had lost a presidential election once before, in 1960, albeit by the narrowest of ...”

“... from the 1980s acquired an enthusiastic libertarian following (Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ronald Reagan). Increasing wealth shouldn’t be seen as a drain on the earth’s resources. Rather, wealth and new technology call forth new supplies, new methods for finding and extracting them, and new alternatives to existing resources. More people means ...”

“... it had lost a war which hadn’t been worth fighting in the first place. This was around the time Ronald Reagan observed: ‘Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do next time this happens.’ The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest ...”

“... his service in Vietnam and his work with Henry Kissinger; and the camera lingers on pictures of Ronald Reagan on Robert Parker’s walls. But it’s an honest enough movie to distribute the blame for global homogenising tendencies, if not quite honest enough to admit that there’s never been a time when the world’s wine drinkers have had a greater ...”

“... with the self-dramatising tendencies of the political characters, tendencies that will produce Ronald Reagan, Vidal’s ‘Acting President’ (who was in office when the novel was being written). By the early 1920s everyone in the book, not just Caroline and her Hollywood cronies, is meant ‘to think like a movie’. The chief political characters ...”

“... healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1986, ‘the most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”’The assumptions of the Anglo-American mainstream have remained unchanged for decades, despite the dramatic rise ...”

“... of the Vietnam debacle and started to spread in the late 1970s. It receded briefly during the Reagan-Gorbachev rapprochement and the crumbling of communism but resurged in the late 1990s, in tandem with the eastward march of Nato. When the idea of Nato expansion first surfaced in policy circles in the mid-1990s, Brzezinski – no longer in office but ...”

“... the disparate elements of the American Right into the great crusade which was to culminate in Reagan’s election in 1980. Rising Tide was warmly greeted by Barry Goldwater and its columns featured articles by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline ...”

“... straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in ...”

“... of domination by the Democratic Party, as had been the case from the 1930s until 1980, when Ronald Reagan restored normality and routed the commies. Rumsfeld had for the past week been ubiquitous in the American media, hawking a phone app he had helped devise called Churchill Solitaire, based on a card game taught to him by another diplomat during ...”

“... the decade that followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical ...”