“... near certain that Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, would lose the 1996 presidential election. Bill Clinton had ground down the campaign waged against him by the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. So what would happen at the Republican convention? Might a non-event be interesting, anthropologically if not politically? San Diego has several famous ...”

“... you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so ...”

“... second term in office, but the American voters were easily distracted by the youthful charisma of Bill Clinton, who soon outshone the staid establishment figure and his increasingly ridiculous running mate. Bush suffered a humiliating defeat in 1992, retreating to Texas to lick his wounds. Saddam, in contrast, remained firmly ensconced in ...”

“... his confidence in the future of Iraqi democracy was now equalled by his confidence in a Hillary Clinton victory. Afterwards, he wrote, we should ‘treat Trump voters as though the whole sorry episode of his candidacy never occurred’. Aglow with triumphal assurance and magnanimity, he added this reservation: ‘Patronising Trump voters would also be a ...”

“... of a Nazi commandant’s breeches. Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, is there near Bill Clinton (Epstein had 20 different numbers for Clinton, who travelled on his plane on 12 occasions). Governors, heiresses, models and bankers, lawyers and actors, scientists and Prince Andrew’s ex, Sarah Ferguson ...”

“... term expired in 1989. Bush was a one-term president, defeated in the election of 1992 by Bill Clinton, who, though coming from humble origins himself, has founded a third dynasty. Clinton served two terms, but his own vice-president, Al Gore, lost the 2000 election in very controversial circumstances to ...”

“... They pointed to the WTO’s close co-operation with transnational corporations, to the fact that Bill Gates was co-chair of the summit, to the problems with the organisation’s underlying assumption of the benefits of free trade, and to the lack of transparency in its procedures. The US-based activists, for their part, leaned heavily on the ...”

“... in the White House overlapped with the early years of Blair’s and Howard’s premierships. Bill Clinton was the sincerest liar in modern political history, and what he, and his opponents, and the American public discovered was that the sincerity could easily trump the lies. Clinton’s popularity rose as his ...”

“... in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets – ‘Crooked Kamala’, ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ – but they didn’t stick, since Harris is attached to no known scandals. He tried the old ‘Barack HUSSEIN Obama’ un-American birther line, deliberately mispronouncing her name at his rallies ...”

“... a surrogate opponent – would prove decisive in debate series from Ford/Carter in 1976 to Bush/Clinton 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 end of a five-year transition period. They were belatedly tabled at the summit convened by Bill Clinton at Camp David in July 2000, but Jerusalem was the issue that ultimately led to the failure of the summit and the breakdown of the Oslo peace process. Religious rivalries are notoriously difficult to resolve, and Jerusalem’s spiritual ...”

“... the Bush-Dukakis duel, and least of all the utter post-political vacuity that has descended since Bill Clinton became able (with the help of a fragment of archival footage) to proclaim himself the heir to a styrofoam Round Table and – one is forced to add – all the vulgar perks that went with it.As with the flickering film shot by the accidental ...”

“... The words in that debate mattered, as did their delivery. Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton 18 times (compared to 51 interruptions in the first debate). His reply to the moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about his videotaped boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, which had been released a few days earlier, was: ‘But it’s locker room ...”

“... the provable charges were not serious. In the course of pressing their flimsy legal case, however, Clinton’s Republican tormentors predicted extravagantly that, if the President were not sent packing at once, ‘the beacon of liberty’ would be ‘snuffed out’. Without immediate impeachment and removal, one of their foremost legal minds also ...”

“... the economy and hostility to organised labour. And just as Eisenhower consolidated the New Deal, Bill Clinton consolidated the Reagan revolution. Future historians will probably conclude that the most significant public statement of the first post-Cold War President was not ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ but ‘the era of big government is ...”