“... decision to launch a strike is, at least in theory, the president’s alone. ‘Bomb power’, as Garry Wills called it in a 2010 book, is inseparable from the office of the presidency. Investing the president with the exclusive power to launch a nuclear weapon was originally intended to protect the United States from military officers eager to try their ...”

“... a small, sooty room, like a village bathhouse, with spiders in the corners). In What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills, a sophisticated Catholic liberal, tells a story about comforting his young son, who had woken in the night, afraid that, as the nuns at school had taught, he would go to hell if he sinned. ‘There is not an ounce of heroism in my ...”

“... and several reviewers in Britain and the US condemned the book for its attack on Catholicism. Garry Wills, who had inspired me with his study of the crisis in the faith, Bare Ruined Choirs, criticised my book for its contradictoriness. I show a great love of Mary, he wrote, of the art, liturgy and cult she inspires, while rejecting the meaning of the ...”

“... of Chapman’s Homer a work to be admired, bought, even read right through. The new prefaces by Garry Wills add little to Nicoll’s original, level-headed and accurate introductions, and do not always acknowledge, as they should, that there are still things which ought to be done with Chapman that Nicoll did not do. There is no help here in ...”

“... revolution’?Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power ...”

“... the Iliad; Lincoln’s great speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery was, as Garry Wills has persuasively argued, a reprise of Pericles’ funeral oration, and, like it, was intended as an occasion for the refounding of a polity on the bodies of those who had given their lives for it. The Civil War was not the first war in which ...”