“... who have been milling about the capital for two decades but whose command has now shifted from Bill to Hillary. Despite their differing styles, the intent is the same: rewarding friends and punishing enemies, the latter with such precision that one of her staffers fears Hillary will come to seem little different from ‘Nixon in a pantsuit’. The sense of ...”

“... system’ whereby party functionaries were rewarded with government jobs, and, in Andrew Jackson, a charismatic leader.The intense competition between Democrats and their rivals – the Whigs, and then Republicans – galvanised popular participation in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser (Henry ...”

“... His half-sister – he is a child of divorce and of name-change, just like his political sibling Bill Clinton – is a self-proclaimed Sapphist. In one chapter of this book Gingrich calls with an apparently straight face for abstention from pre-marital sex. But could anyone except an amoral child of the counter-culture have pulled off the ‘Republican ...”

“... When Carter went to Vienna in June 1979 to talk about SALT II with Brezhnev, Senator Scoop Jackson cried ‘appeasement!’ and compared Carter with Neville Chamberlain. Such analogies were already threadbare in the 1970s, though they remain irresistible to embattled militarists.Brzezinski played his cards carefully in the SALT II game. He pronounced a ...”

“... aid to poverty relief, thereby making impossible a repeat of earlier scandals. ‘A useful little Bill,’ Short whispered to me as we sat on the front bench. ‘It makes impossible many of the things that the Foreign Office keep pressing us to do.’ It went through with the enthusiastic support of the Tory opposition, whose spokesman even had the nerve to ...”

“... of citizens and the legitimation of torture as a military tactic. To warriors against terror, the Bill of Rights had become ‘quaint’, as Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, said of the Geneva Conventions.The hysteria provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center created an opportunity for Cheney and his ideological comrades to engineer what ...”

“... knowing John Kerry, and not quite liking him either. Heavily supported by Edward Kennedy (and by Bill Clinton since the Wesley Clark machine puffed its last), Kerry is famous for having none of Kennedy’s backslapping, song-singing, law-making brio, and very little of Clinton’s natural empathy and charisma. People noticed Kerry, they even trusted him, but ...”

“... his £750, the sum allowed for the purchase of a TV set. He’s since said that submitting the bill to the Fees Office was ‘a bit daft’ – a good phrase for the ACA itself, which was introduced in more or less its present form as a temporary fudge under Thatcher and was meant to boost MPs’ salaries while saving them from the embarrassment of passing ...”

“... he signed the Wagner Act that guaranteed those rights); his ‘share the wealth tax’ bill of 1935 was more symbol than substance, a gesture intended to calm the challenge posed from the left by Long. Still, he was a working-class hero – ‘the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch’, as one ...”

“... is tough. I mean, it can’t feel invigorating to put on your bio that you once came second on the bill to someone without a pulse. ‘Are you ready?’ he said again.‘Oh. My. God – yes!’ my neighbour offered. I know she was real because she stood on my foot and I stubbornly trust the link between cause and effect.Like birds in Narnia, pairs of ...”

“... with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, but set him against the likes of Bond and Jesse Jackson, who felt able to challenge pro-Israel politics without pandering to antisemitism.Lewis’s response to the Million Man March in 1995 was in keeping with his characteristic posture. The march was organised by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, a ...”

“... Committee, the former secretary of state George Schultz, the former secretaries of defence Bill Perry and Jim Mattis, and even Henry Kissinger, none of whom had any knowledge of haematology or phlebotomy, but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, even courted Special Operations ...”

“... number of Americans, known as Anti-Federalists, warned of impending tyranny. To mollify them, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, protecting Americans’ essential liberties against abuses of national power. Initially, no clear connection existed between freedom, whiteness and fear of centralised authority. (A large majority of the presidents ...”

“... of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The ...”

“... the South, offering them a new life in the mountains. In 1945, when his fifth son, William (or Bill), was born, Turner was one of four thousand Black people in Lynch. The town was by then one of the most racially diverse places in the country.I moved to Prestonsburg, a mining town not far from Lynch, in the spring of 2020 to write an article about a ...”