“... Constitution draws a line between the public and private spheres, with its First Amendment in the Bill of Rights specifically guaranteeing liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state. Such provisions are held partially to explain the peculiarly non-ideological tenor of American politics. From the outset, moreover, wannabe ‘Americans’ had ...”

“... new generation of readers, it was felt, did not have much time to think, much less read. Michael Jackson’s antics are now accorded front-page prominence; the books page has been replaced by full-colour spreads on fashion and celebrity lifestyles. Other newspapers, struggling to hold their own against the visual media, have imitated the Times’s upmarket ...”

“... tried to calm things down. A fair analogy may come from the 1850s, when the party of Jefferson and Jackson embraced slavery as their vote-getter, while the new Republicans, descendants of the Federalist Party of Adams and Washington, took their stand on anti-slavery and free labour. ‘I remember once being much amused,’ Lincoln wrote in a letter of 1859, at ...”

“... World Wide Web made its first appearance. The period is encapsulated by the excruciating video of Bill Gates and his colleagues dancing on stage at Microsoft’s Windows 1995 launch, the equally cringeworthy video of the entire Democratic National Convention doing the ‘macarena’ a year later (both are on YouTube), or the sitcom Friends, in which ...”

“... up to it. The notion of him at Number Ten has much the same surrealist feel as the idea of Jesse Jackson in the White House ... If Labour is serious about winning, Kinnock has to go.’ This was truth-telling with a vengeance. Since, Johnson concluded, the British electorate were used to authority-figures with an Oxbridge background the Labour Party could do ...”

“... and Candidate Dole; and by the denial of benefits even to legal aliens in the welfare reform bill Clinton signed during the games. But if American self-advertisement openly targets aliens, chauvinism also overcompensates for a national insecurity about the actual history and character of the US. The Olympic acquisition inspired Charles Rutheiser’s ...”

“... almost entirely barred from the militia and regular army, although during the War of 1812 Andrew Jackson called on Louisiana’s free Black militia – a legacy of French rule – to help defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson, who owned many slaves, issued an address condemning the exclusion of Blacks ...”

“... Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the year’ (not least because it took half of BBC2’s entire drama budget to make), but he never warmed to what he once dismissed as ‘some history of the ...”

“... to infirm octogenarians holding on to office when unable to discharge their responsibilities; the Bill of Rights includes the right to bear arms but excludes any sort of equality right; and, to top it all, the amendment procedure renders the constitution the most difficult to alter of any in the world, meaning that any significant reform to the system is ...”

“... in Tennessee. I was planning to attend a party that evening thrown by the Nation for Jesse Jackson. It was not to be. We waited on standby at the airport late into the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help ...”

“... Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam ...”

“... youth, good looks and fast celebrity count for a lot. But he’s not, and his appearance at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, after a $2300 per head reception and a Women for Obama luncheon, drew about 1500 people, leaving the room half-empty. Nor was his speech terribly compelling, making his usual points about inclusiveness and taking a ...”

“... and that the Prince Regent seemed a Lord of Misrule: they did not know when the Great Reform Bill would be passed, as prologue to the stable reign of Victoria. In times like these, Abstract Ideas have great power. David Bromwich does (with proper suspicion) include one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s ...”

“... trade unions pressed hard for industrial and even national economic planning: a full employment bill that would legally oblige the government to guarantee jobs, either by creating them in the public sector or by encouraging private investment; a new development bank to help steer capital to ageing sectors of American industry and to help new ones get ...”

“... The Brides in the Bath murderer George Smith and John Christie of Rillington Place fitted the bill, while the Kray Brothers became tabloid proto-celebrities even as they were ordering gangland rivals to be shot or hacked to death. But there were limits, and in 1966 the horrors that came out during the Moors murders trial of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady ...”