“... workers could extract and prepare for shipping more than twelve thousand tons of coal.In 1938, William Earl Turner moved to Lynch and was assigned a bed in one of the company boarding houses for single miners. Turner had been working in and around Central Appalachia since he left school, aged twelve, nine years earlier. Within a year of arriving in Lynch ...”

“... father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion ...”

“... Live Line, and supported the vehement Protestants who opposed the election of the Catholic Kennedy. The Bushes have never liked the Kennedys either, because they were Catholics – although the Walkers had been too – and because they were wealthy. ‘They never had to work,’ the second President Bush said of the Kennedys in 1989. ‘They never had ...”

“... and confident a vision of America’s role in the world or its responsibilities at home as John Kennedy. The liberal confidence he and, for a time, Lyndon Johnson came to represent produced, in the early Sixties, an impressive array of domestic and foreign initiatives. The liberal agenda was an ambitious one, but at the time few doubted the nation’s ...”

“... In 1960, Kirk Douglas revealed that Trumbo had written the screenplay for Spartacus; President Kennedy crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put ...”

“... such nonsense, nor, when confronted by Widdicombe’s at least equally simplistic demands, will William Hague. The fact that Labour has now loosed itself from its traditional moorings and restraints is visible, too, in the growing sleaze chronicled by Tom Bower. Although Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately ...”

“... Twenties. It is hard to believe, as you drive from the West Side down 125th Street en route for Kennedy, that it was ever a glamorous place. It is now generally thought to be dangerous; drivers lock their car doors at traffic-lights and dread the ‘squeegee merchants’ – I daresay that trade, so irksome to Mr Straw, had its origins in New York City. But ...”

“... her.It should be noted that the party was held two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, such boozy antics somewhat dissonant in what was for most Americans a joyless holiday season. Yet what appears to have peeved Kazin was something closer to home: the crass spectacle of chums and colleagues gloating over their ascendant ...”

“... At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady. If she appeared to the Tory faithful as a painfully nostalgic evocation of the glory ...”

“... Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he defeated Dick Taverne (later a Labour MP) and William Rees-Mogg (later the editor of the Times) for the Union presidency. Like one of his successors as Liberal leader, Charles Kennedy, he became an MP at a young age and came to public notice through his entertaining ...”

“... power of banks and other sinister financial interests. Half a century or so after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, around 60 per cent of Americans still dissent from the official verdict that a lone gunman was responsible, though there’s no consensus about the identity of the conspirators: variously the Mafia, the CIA or Castro’s Cuba. In the ...”

“... within the consulting room. There is a story, though, from his years of fame, that when Edward Kennedy came over from Hyannisport to consult him about running for President, Erikson asked him to think about what kind of old age he wanted. He had at first been doubtful about the whole psychoanalytical milieu, so ‘intensely verbal’ as he described ...”

“... US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the combination of ...”

“... fallout, he spoke out forcefully in defence of atmospheric testing, so much so that President Kennedy was under the impression that Teller thought a little extra radiation was good for you. At the same time, Teller’s enthusiasm for all things nuclear spilled over into a series of fantastic plans for the ‘peaceful’ use of these devices. In secret ...”

“... Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and sub-genres: the Chester-Belloc style of essay writing is caricatured in Egbert Merrymarsh, and there is a postgraduate sherry-party scene that was supposed to be a kind of distillation of the post-Amis ...”