“... On 1 January 2009, around two in the morning, 19 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in Oakland, California while lying face down on a train platform with his hands behind his back. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died seven hours later ...”

“... of thought that feels as if it might become an idea for something. Or that day when inexplicably Barack Obama gets elected. Or after you have just bought the perfect skirt, the one you have been wasting all your money trying to find all your life. Ditto a lover. Previously happiness has been understood to be a matter of happenstance – most of the ...”

“... was another piece in the Guardian. Evans accused the American press of an excessive fondness for Barack Obama, which was fair enough, but also lamented ‘the persecution of Hillary Clinton’, and the ‘continuous insinuations’ that ‘the Clintons were race-baiters,’ which Evans called ‘absurd defamation’. Why absurd? When Bill Clinton ...”

“... by September 2014 he was being shown round the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington DC by Barack Obama, and in June 2016 he addressed a joint session of Congress on the subject of his and America’s shared ‘philosophy of freedom’.Rupert Murdoch anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with the best policies since independence’. Addressing ...”

“... a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On the podium were the 492nd-ranked pro woman golfer; a soap opera actress turned avocado farmer, presented against an avocado-green screen (‘for all of you guacamole lovers out there’); a former ...”

“... In 2011​ Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons ...”

“... of forty by starting and taking public a series of research and investment firms and served the Obama administration as ‘chief performance officer’, ran Biden’s transition organisation before becoming his Covid tsar. Zients’s team included a former healthcare executive who had dreamed of being a foreign correspondent and now kept the public informed ...”

“... Prince Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and reportedly brokered a meeting between Greensill and Barack Obama. But his main job seems to have been making representations to his former colleagues. In April 2020, as the pandemic took hold, Cameron pressed the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to include the now ailing Greensill in the government’s Covid ...”

“... militarism that now defines his stance toward Iraq, Iran, China, Russia, and Palestine. Barack Obama, though more sceptical than McCain or Clinton regarding war as an instrument of policy, nonetheless has preferred advisers, including, until recently, Samantha Power, who take a very enlarged view of the obligations of the West to spread our ...”

“... and by most accounts, won valuable debating points with the American public in doing so. Barack Obama has struck a markedly different tone on foreign policy and national security. Starting with his inaugural address, he has emphasised the importance of multilateralism, of co-operation and engagement with the outside world, and of international ...”

“... Trump’s description of African nations as ‘shit-hole countries’. In the repeated claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States, which first made Trump a national political figure, there is an echo of Johnson’s rejection of black citizenship. More than a century and a half since his impeachment, the ghost of Andrew Johnson still ...”

“... took a dive during the second debate in Nashville, when an off the cuff reference to his opponent, Barack Obama, as ‘that one’ caused a sudden surge of negative opinion, visible to TV audiences across America.The rapid expansion and consolidation of social media platforms led by Facebook has driven the logic of the ‘worm’ into everyday life. In ...”

“... should have ‘an extraordinary corps’ of armed citizens patrolling the halls. After all, Obama’s daughters were protected with guns: ‘Are the president’s kids more important than yours?’ an NRA ad asked. In 2018, after 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, LaPierre said the solution was to arm teachers. News stations ...”

“... any of it to music, but still I hummed the songs.I had watched 1776 on Election Day in 2012, when Barack Obama was re-elected, but failed to do so again in 2016; perhaps that was where everything went off the rails. To watch 1776 as the votes are counted seems like a harmless tradition, if a little bit twee – a little bit neolib, perhaps, a little bit ...”

“... visits a family living in the ‘blackwater slum’ of Makoko, just outside Lagos, and interviews Barack Obama during his historic trip to Alaska. The book skips along with the brisk pace of magazine journalism – some of the chapters first appeared in a different form in publications such as Rolling Stone – and Goodell finds people with visionary ...”