Eat Your Spinach

Tony Wood: Russia and the West, 2 March 2017

Return to Cold War 
by Robert Legvold.
Polity, 208 pp., £14.99, February 2016, 978 1 5095 0189 2
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Should We Fear Russia? 
by Dmitri Trenin.
Polity, 144 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 5095 1091 7
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Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War 
by Peter Conradi.
Oneworld, 384 pp., £18.99, February 2017, 978 1 78607 041 8
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... Not since​ the days of Ronald Reagan has Russia played such a prominent role in US political life. After Donald Trump’s shock victory – greeted in the Russian parliament with cheers and champagne – came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated (even more) compromising information on Trump ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... was 10.2 per cent in October 2009). Jimmy Carter, who had appointed Volcker, was crushed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. But inflation was brought under control, and the lesson was learned: central banks must not concern themselves with the election cycle if they are to guarantee price stability. By the end of the 1990s, most of ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary Cooper, was infinitely glamorous and their marriage was more or less instantly unhappy, since Neal wanted to be a movie star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he ...

Hate Burst Out

Kim Phillips-Fein: Chicago, 1968, 15 August 2024

The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 
by Luke A. Nichter.
Yale, 370 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 300 25439 6
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... 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 ...

Operation Barbarella

Rick Perlstein: Hanoi Jane, 17 November 2005

Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon 
by Mary Hershberger.
New Press, 228 pp., £13.99, September 2005, 1 56584 988 4
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... 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 ...

Libel on the Human Race

Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet 
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 0 674 72871 4
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... 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 ...

Hedonistic Fruit Bombs

Steven Shapin: How good is Château Pavie?, 3 February 2005

Bordeaux 
by Robert Parker.
Dorling Kindersley, 1244 pp., £45, December 2003, 1 4053 0566 5
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The Wine Buyer’s Guide 
by Robert Parker and Pierre-Antoine Rovani.
Dorling Kindersley, two volumes, £50, December 2002, 0 7513 4979 8
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Mondovino 
directed by Jonathan Nossiter.
November 2004
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... 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 ...

No Accident

Zachary Leader: Gore Vidal’s Golden Age, 21 June 2001

The Golden Age: A Novel 
by Gore Vidal.
Little, Brown, 467 pp., £17.99, October 2000, 0 316 85409 3
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... 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 ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... 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 ...

Globaloney

Jackson Lears: Brzezinski’s Cold War, 5 March 2026

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet 
by Edward Luce.
Bloomsbury, 545 pp., £30, May 2025, 978 1 5266 3784 0
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... 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 ...

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1
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The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2
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... 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 ...

The Framing of al-Megrahi

Gareth Peirce: The Death of Justice, 24 September 2009

... 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 ...

Driving through a Postcard

Christian Lorentzen: In New Hampshire, 3 March 2016

... 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 ...

Don’t be a Kerensky!

David Runciman: Kissinger looks for his prince, 3 December 2020

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World 
by Barry Gewen.
Norton, 452 pp., £22.99, April 2020, 978 1 324 00405 9
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Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography 
by Thomas Schwartz.
Hill and Wang, 548 pp., £27.99, September 2020, 978 0 8090 9537 7
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... 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 ...

Who Will Lose?

David Edgar, 25 September 2008

Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future 
by Newton Minow and Craig LaMay.
Chicago, 219 pp., £11.50, April 2008, 978 0 226 53041 3
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... in 1992. Prep was never more significant than in the debates of 1980 and 1984, in both of which Ronald Reagan’s surrogate opponent was David Stockman, a young former radical who went on to head the Office of Management and Budget before resigning over the budget deficit in Reagan’s second term. Stockman had been ...