“... Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were demonised ...”

“... CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could be pardoned for hoping that a reorientation of policy was underway.But almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in ...”

“... that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy’s assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an ...”

“... dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half ...”

“... adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who ...”

“... vague, that a dramatic social transformation was in the air. The grandiloquent rhetoric of John F. Kennedy fed the recurrent American dream of world regeneration. As a black African on the cutting edge of his country’s drive for independence, Barack was determined to be at the centre of whatever shifts occurred. The East-West Center encouraged global ...”

“... recorded for the edification of the future and the gratification of the present. The puritanical Richard Ingrams, who neither smokes nor drinks, and lives a scandalously chaste life, appears to many like some rumpled, corduroy-jacketed Robespierre (though Robespierre was a sybarite by comparison, diluting his water with wine). How has this change come ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... on the US being willing to sacrifice, say, Chicago for Birmingham. The belief was borne out by Kennedy’s decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis to modify the US/Nato nuclear command and control system: he insisted that should the US attack Cuba and the Soviets retaliate with nuclear strikes on Europe, the US could not retaliate in turn without ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... devices. ‘If you had physical access to the weapons, you could use them,’ Wellerstein says. Kennedy, alarmed by how easy Eisenhower had made it to use nuclear weapons, introduced new controls, including an intricate system of locks and codes designed to create a more coherent system of command with the president at its apex, but he didn’t shy away ...”

“... by Eisenhower during the Sputnik crisis of 1957. Some of these advisers had been appointed by Kennedy or Johnson, and Nixon suspected them – correctly – of opposing his plans for missile defence and a federally subsidised supersonic commercial airliner. One of the advisers, Richard Garwin, a renowned physicist who ...”

“... scandal, but it was acting in the national interest. Johnson’s real hero, however, is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous ...”

“... diaries get their reward. If we see the politics of the Sixties more from the point of view of Richard Crossman than, say, of Michael Stewart, the reason is that Crossman kept a diary and Stewart did not. Nevertheless, the possibility of publication is seldom the only reason for keeping a diary. Like any habit that becomes addictive, diary-writing has its ...”