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“... in the Third World, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the election of Ronald Reagan. In short, we do not know very much of consequence – which is why the experts keep falling back on restatements of whatever happens to be the current cliché. An example is Paul Dibb’s The Soviet Union: The Incomplete Super-Power, whose ...”

“... effect of reading the same story again and again across so many fields is arresting. When Ronald Reagan begins to sound like Judith Butler and right-wing evangelicals make the linguistic turn, it’s clear there is something in the air. ‘Ideas,’ Rodgers writes, ‘moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of ...”

“... these trusted things. The darkening in this period seems cultural, too, as though, not long after Ronald Reagan declared it ‘morning again in America’, Ruscha had countered with an evening world: in the paintings of this period we sense not ‘a shining city on a hill’ but the twilight of American gods. The exceptionalism of the United States ...”

“... pages, full of this kind of upfront bitchiness, will already know, this is an indictment of Nancy Reagan composed by the vacuum-cleaner method. Five years of ‘meticulous’ research and over a thousand interviews have been sucked into the Kitty machine so as to give us the accumulated dirt. The book has been enormously successful, justifying its author’s ...”

“... the pattern of every series since the early 1980s. No major, Gerald Ford-type gaffe, no obvious, Reagan-like knockout blow, but a careful, well-rehearsed negotiation for minute advantage, contests in which confidence, body language, expression, and even forms of address have proved as important as points of policy. Probably closest to the Clinton-Dole ...”

“... in this area at least, he no longer suffers from triumphalist illusions. He refused to follow Ronald Reagan and nominate plain-spoken originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Instead, he took the path described in my previous essay,* and tendered stealth nominees whose public records provided few clues as to future performance. Not that this ...”

“... At the same time, he regularly lobbied California conservatives, led by the state’s governor, Ronald Reagan. Against their charges of appeasement and betrayal, Kissinger exaggerated the success of his bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia. ‘We achieved what we were after,’ he said. He defended himself against staff members who resigned in protest ...”

“... Southern self. She owns and rides horses (her trainer is played by Humphrey Bogart, her friend by Ronald Reagan), and when she learns that a man is leaving the city for a life in Vermont she says: ‘What are you going to do there between yawns?’ She has a sense of honour as well as plenty of pride, and when she rides her horse into a fence she ...”

“... encouraging or promoting’ homosexual activity could be fired. Quite a large mandate, and even Ronald Reagan, no longer governor of California, and not yet president of the country, was against the proposition. Of course, because this is a biopic and because we know the story, the proposition is overturned, largely thanks to Milk’s inventive and ...”

“... us with another America, of main streets, front yards, soft, riverine light: home to James Dean, Ronald Reagan and Mark Twain, three utterly dissimilar characters but emblematic for Tice of a certain idea of America. The images in Lincoln at first seem something else entirely. In fact, through these photographs of memorials of Abraham Lincoln in ...”

“... and social forces that fascinated him all his life. The book for which he is probably best known, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987), is remarkably acute about the way a former movie actor, with an unnerving habit of conflating film and reality, succeeded ‘in making himself the benign centre of America and ...”

“... are those quoted from the American buttons themselves: ‘Men are the ancestors of apes,’ ‘Ronald Reagan is a lesbian,’ ‘If it moves, fondle it.’ Lastly, to return to the issue of nationalism, there is a long poem here, too, ‘Story Under Full Sail’, a group of lyrics about a swashbuckling sea-captain Rezanov who, by marrying the daughter ...”

“... Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) party in the American capital. Although Ronald Reagan was poised to become the arbiter of the collective conscience of America, Jimmy Carter was still President and social liberalism was in full swing – or so those gathered to celebrate a year’s worth of victories for civil liberty in ...”

“... William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in Nicaragua. The elder Bush later renominated him and got him through. Gates would have struck George H.W. Bush as a sound appointment because he knew the ...”

“... cost Schlesinger many of his friends on the left, but it won him new admirers, including the actor Ronald Reagan, who later said Schlesinger’s lurid fresco of the Hollywood communist underworld contributed to his political awakening. But Schlesinger’s anti-communism during the 1940s was still tempered by a commitment to democratic socialism. In a 1947 ...”