“... 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 ...”

“... anti-apartheid activists faced in forcing European and American leaders to impose sanctions when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sympathised with the Pretoria regime. Walter’s attribution of the fall of apartheid to pity, white-collar public outrage, elite wisdom, capitalist pragmatism and demographic determinism is odd in a book about civil ...”

“... Goldwater (‘regarded more than any other living American with almost universal affection’) and Ronald Reagan (‘about to engage in a great enterprise – indeed this occasion is at once his last, and unlikeliest, chance to back out’). Peering out elf-like from the convivial flux was Oakeshott. Perhaps we should imagine the young Mount ...”

“... and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy good-for-nothing with 11 ...”

“... Arabs were the new Nazis and Yasser Arafat the new Hitler, Begin assaulted Lebanon. By the time Ronald Reagan accused him of perpetrating a ‘holocaust’ and ordered him to end it, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese and obliterated large parts of Beirut. In his novel Kapo (1993), the ...”

“... the Eighties presented spectacle of almost unrelieved decadence, in which the ‘virtues’ of the Reagan era ruled. In this desert of greed, vanity and corruption one could always rely on the tonic of Robert Hughes pieces in Time and the New York Review of Books, now collected. He lays about him splendidly, not sparing any link in the chain that tethers ...”

“... which have no use for social democracy – e.g. those of Pius IX, Nicholas II, Leonid Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan. Such governments find it useful to insist that there are universal, objective truths. This insistence supports their claim that certain basic social practices (the ones favourable to their continued rule) are beyond the reach of ...”

“... off the graph. Was this, for a start, the same Ayatollah as the one who had gone pimping with Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in order to arm the colonial mercenaries in Nicaragua who had been so eloquently opposed by Salman Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile? Or was it the other Ayatollah, the genial friend of Kurdistan? The ally of the women of Persia? Who ...”

“... his moral seriousness. His short speech touched in his usual haphazard way on familiar themes – Ronald Reagan, Pinochet’s Chile, Latin America in the 1980s, colonialism in Africa, the need for a new economy, environmental protections, new homes and quality mental health services, a plea for respectful debate, the need for Labour to reinvent itself as ...”

“... mainly as shorthand for a set of right-wing policies espoused in the 1970s by Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and by miscellaneous demented conservatives ever since: ‘rolling back the state’ and ‘empowering the individual’ through privatisation, tax cuts and deregulation. But before that it referred to a body of theory ...”

“... whom Robert McFarlane would describe as ‘an imaginative, aggressive, committed young officer’, Ronald Reagan’s personally approved ‘hero’. There was Oliver North the Man of God, the born-again Christian from the charismatic Episcopal Church of the Apostles who believed that the Lord had healed his wounds and who – in the words of one former ...”

“... in the north-east, were pro-life. Prominent Republicans, including (for much of their careers) Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, were often pro-choice on principle – they were, after all, meant to be the defenders of individual liberty. Many states would probably have eventually liberalised abortion laws on their own. In 1970, abortion was legal ...”

“... than an alliance of interests; it is a meeting of minds between types of statesman or stateswoman. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were self-consciously the last great leaders in the nation-state tradition, even though it was their regimes that broke the link between the state and welfare. George W. Bush and Tony Blair are ‘among the first ...”

“... history of racial extermination. To demonstrate its continuing role in US politics, Evans cites Ronald Reagan’s decision to begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s ...”

“... he was moving too far to the right, a suspicion confirmed when he became a devoted supporter of Ronald Reagan and willingly accepted the label of neo-conservative. But out of reverence for Lionel, his old mentor, Podhoretz tended to focus his annoyance on the often more obsessed, outspoken Diana. He had always treated her, he confesses, ‘as though ...”