“... his vast volume on TR’s early career, was appointed the official biographer of President Reagan, and caused considerable controversy when Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan appeared in 1999 because in it he created an imaginary narrator. That willingness to experiment with narrative technique continues in the ...”

“... of destabilising Afghanistan, Brzezinski hoped to turn it into Russia’s Vietnam. Under Ronald Reagan, the RDJTF matured into United States Central Command. Reagan increased the flow of weapons and support to the mujahedin, whom he hailed as ‘freedom fighters’ and compared to the Founding Fathers. He also ...”

“... on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal millionaires from ...”

“... ability to fuse his knowledge with brilliant polemicism (as in his recent pamphlet denouncing the Reagan Administration’s Star Wars proposal). But most of all, he has worked to provide the two things any successful movement must have: an unambiguous moral vision, a clear, understandable goal free of numbing complexities and bureaucratic obstacles; and a ...”

“... Springsteen’s authority is not that of an employer or official, but of an interpreter. Like Ronald Reagan, he is thought to speak for, as well as to, a social group denominated ‘ordinary people’: disadvantaged whites, small farmers and factory workers, truck-drivers and garage mechanics, the holders (or losers) of millions of dirty and ill-paid ...”

“... and Republican acceptance speech from those of Truman and Dewey in 1948 to those of Carter and Reagan in 1980, as well as those of some of their illustrious predecessors. What strikes me is the extent to which they represent a canon – albeit a rather fossilised canon – in the literature of American political rhetoric. They follow well-established ...”

“... man. Jimmy Carter, Annapolis graduate, is just that.’ Walter Mondale, in 1984, set out to attack Ronald Reagan on Star Wars: ‘Mondale,’ the advert said, ‘an army man, senator on the National Security Council, vice-president. He knows the world for the tough place it is.’ But Reagan had a plan to outspend the ...”

“... reform is only part of the answer. There is also, Perlstein argues, the gravity-defying rise of Ronald Reagan. At the height of the Watergate crisis, most Republicans were compelled to cede ground to the Democrats. But not Reagan, who stood out for the sunny perversity of his ‘refusal to wax morose’. The ...”

“... prime minister’s first act on taking office was to hasten to Washington to exchange grins with Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden. We sustain our sense of self from the benign glow of the imperial gaze. It is hard to love a country if it doesn’t also awaken a measure of awe and fear. Soviet exiles love Russia because and not in spite of the fact that ...”

“... that her superiors are the true idealists: their religion is free-market capitalism, their gods Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, their gospel the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal. They are arch Clinton-haters (the book begins in 1993), and despise affirmative action, feminism, the disabled and everything else Cath’s moral conscience would ...”

“... in combination with austerity served to give ‘socialism’ a bad name. According to Kynaston, Ronald Reagan spent four months in Britain in the winter of 1948-49, and came to the conclusion that if this was social progress he wanted none of it. He froze, he almost starved (‘what they do to the food we did to the American Indian’) and he abandoned ...”

“... to power. Director of the CIA in the late 1970s, he served two terms as Vice-President to Ronald Reagan before riding into the Oval Office on the coat-tails of the great communicator – and of Reagan’s somewhat inadvertent victory in the Cold War. But Bush and his advisers were caught offguard by the massive ...”

“... legislation to end its use; a bill was introduced in the House but died in the Senate. In 1987, Ronald Reagan told a meeting of Republican governors that gerrymanders were ‘corrupt’.In August, before the Texas map was passed into law, most of the Democratic members of the state legislature left Austin, depriving it of a quorum. For two weeks, they ...”

“... more than that. As luck would have it, the Iran-Iraq war coincided with the election of President Ronald Reagan and his wild bunch, in particular his special friend and constant adviser, the former advertising mogul he made director of the CIA, William Casey. Casey and the gang of right-wing fanatics he quickly promoted to the White House were obsessed ...”

“... but that it is good enough to start with. Undoubtedly there were many resemblances between the Reagan Administration and the Thatcher Government. But between the wars the British Conservative Party had much more in common with the American Democrats than with the Republicans, and the same is true of some other periods. Yet Honderich proclaims his purpose ...”