“... movie.’) Just before the 1992 Presidential election, I went to interview Gingrich for the BBC. Clinton wanted ‘change’, he scoffed. Well, if the electorate really wanted change they would throw out the encrusted Democratic leadership in Congress, with its entourage of lobbyists, lawyers and special interests. ...”

“... and the largest risk he had taken on any issue. The time to publicise the outlines of such a bill was during those December days when the grief of the parents overwhelmed the country. Obama’s solution was characteristic. He announced that Joe Biden would explore the legislative possibilities and report back in a month. As the weeks passed, various ...”

“... Day, the Olympic summer’s top-grossing movie, endorsed for promoting family values by President Clinton 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 ...”

“... UN. ‘He called for human rights in foreign policy,’ Packer writes, ‘but not too much.’When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, Holbrooke glowered as his onetime best friend Anthony Lake became national security adviser, a position he coveted but was never given. Instead, the Bosnian war became Holbrooke’s long-sought tryst with destiny. It ...”

“... On Sunday 21 March the House of Representatives passed a healthcare bill that had been promoted for a year and brokered in many particulars by Barack Obama. This marked a victory for a substantial piece of social legislation, the first of its kind in more than three decades; and the result appears to have given the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive reform ...”

“... a small clique of well-connected tycoons, while Nafta, the free-trade deal signed by Salinas and Bill Clinton in 1994, blew away much of the Mexican agricultural sector, providing a cheap workforce for the maquiladoras – factories set up in increasing numbers to benefit from new tax breaks. The state that many Mexican intellectuals had identified as ...”

“... and not the other way around. True, the Secretary of Labour Robert Reich and other members of the Clinton Administration have rather suddenly taken to criticising the mass firings on the part of major corporations in general and of AT & T in particular (40,000 initially budgeted for, later reduced to 18,000). But at the same time, the ...”

“... some thirty years before). In the 1990s, Schlesinger settled into a gentle scepticism towards Bill Clinton. While he never saw Clinton’s impeachment hearings as a welcome chance to deal a blow to the imperial presidency – ‘Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives’ – he was repelled by some of the ...”

“... successes. Gerald Ford restored Lee’s American citizenship in 1975; as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton joined other Southern politicians in merging the state holidays for Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. In the last five years, however, mass protests against racial injustice have engendered a more critical attitude. With the Confederacy now more ...”

“... One of them was Frank Aller, an extraordinarily nice boy who was the roommate and best friend of Bill Clinton, then scraggle-bearded, fattish and vaguely on our side. Frank, in his neatly pressed Brooks Brothers suit, looked (and was) so incorruptibly straight that on demos we often put him instead of volatile Harry in front of the TV cameras. Frank ...”

“... the repeal of the estate tax contributed only about a tenth. The compromises needed to get the bill passed meant that the estate tax could only be wound down in stages, with final repeal coming into effect in 2010. Moreover, the bill as a whole included a sunset clause, which requires all its measures to be revoked in ...”

“... out of court. State-building, in the new world order, is a European idea, and one of the reasons Bill Clinton is thought to have flirted with being a ‘European’ President is his willingness to flirt with this idea as well (flirting, it might be said, is also opposed to the martial qualities of true American politics). But state-building is also the ...”

“... stole, and he admires himself in it. Next he is on the boat to England, making friends with ‘Clinton of Univ’, who seduces the girls in first class and brings them to Stephen’s berth after dinner with a linen napkin of petits fours. And now he is in the Dyson Perrins lab in Oxford, making LSD from pages torn from a library book. He meets Andrea, his ...”

“... protean surface upon which one can grow tendrils like Mr Morris and, for the matter of that, Mr Clinton. The President is justly renowned for dropping old friends like hot bricks if they threaten him with embarrassment, but he clung to Morris long after he had been exposed as a sleazebag, and still speaks of him in terms of lip-biting regret. In ...”

“... of themselves as temperate and moderate-minded public men. He has shown no such signs with Hillary Clinton. In retrospect this makes her appointment as secretary of state all the more perplexing. There is no reason to believe that by appointing her, Obama removed a threat she would have posed as a senatorial counterweight against his authority. The idea that ...”