“... In the final year of the last century, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which offered the fantasy of a different kind of liberal president ...”

“... pressures were mounting to deal with long-deferred domestic priorities. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton nor Boris Yeltsin could claim the authority in foreign affairs that Reagan and Gorbachev had commanded during the mid-Eighties – or, for that matter, their ability to think ahead, however superficially, about where they would like the world to ...”

“... more than the slipperiness of language. ‘I guess you could say that the people have spoken,’ Bill Clinton famously remarked after the 2000 election, ‘and now we have to figure out what they said.’ As it turned out, the task of figuring this out devolved to the media when the Supreme Court stopped the recount, and the reader guesses that the ...”

“... seven to Everest. Their book was ghosted by William Northdurft, who has also written books for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Given what they had to gain professionally, what more of a spin did they need? Both Ghosts of Everest and Lost on Everest are arrogantly insensitive to the country. They might, for instance, have mentioned the negotiations between ...”

“... credo of ‘secular humanism’. To what degree are these terms coded? Throughout his Presidency, Bill Clinton was regularly identified with a ‘cultural elite’ conveniently visualised in the form of his Hollywood supporters Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand. Similarly, when conservative Republicans campaign against Hollywood’s moral ...”

“... all three presidents tried before the Senate have been acquitted.In contrast to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, which arose from a sexual escapade, that of Andrew Johnson 130 years earlier involved some of the most intractable problems in American history. How should the nation be reunited after the Civil War? Who is entitled to American ...”

“... or even primarily, been conservatives. Back in 1992, it was rumoured that he might be made head of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. The job went instead to Laura D’Andrea Tyson, and in Pop Internationalism and Peddling Prosperity Krugman dismissed Tyson and other Clinton advisors, including the labour ...”

“... In June 1994, Bill Clinton came close to launching a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994 ...”

“... so to speak, exported. There can be no such magical resolutions of the problems of Second Reform Bill England; and the ‘magical’ devices of the novel have begun to buckle literary realism itself, pressing it up against a limit it will take a D.H. Lawrence to transcend. Reconciling the uniqueness of an individual life with broader social patterns is a ...”

“... or semi-skilled workers whose utter uselessness in a ‘high-tech’ economy is by now proverbial. Clinton’s Secretary of labour Robert Reich, for example, has made an entire career out of mourning their fate, while at every turn disclaiming any intention of interfering with the divine processes of the economy – he takes it for granted, as almost everybody ...”

“... and journalists of the left: men like Robert Reich, James Fallows, Lester Thurow, Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, all of whom saw themselves in opposition to an older labour-liberal establishment that was sceptical of the market and friendly to the state. The ‘fracture of the social’ that followed, Rodgers insists, ‘was, in the end, as much a product of ...”

“... imagines the early American legislators blinking in astonished awe as Congress gets Washington’s bill and ‘coughs up $100,000’ for expenses. All the lesser characters echo his obsession. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought his salary (a quarter of the president’s) ‘a sort of "curiosity"’; it has not been recorded, Vidal writes, whether ...”

“... agentless, a public orphan: ‘I’ve no mamma, no papa, no dente, no casa.’ Uninvited by Bill Clinton to join other high-achieving Italian-Americans, such as Nicolas Cage, Martin Scorsese and ex-baseball player Joe Garagiola, at the bean-feast held in honour of President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Corso is typecast as an involuntary amnesia case, a ...”

“... just over the border would bombard Seoul; some of the shells would be armed with poison gas. When Bill Clinton was contemplating a ‘surgical strike’ on the Yongbyon nuclear plant in 1994, he was told that the war that would almost certainly follow would kill as many as a million people (including a hundred thousand Americans), cost the United States ...”

“... realising its implications, when he said: ‘Chris Patten can only express his exasperation, but Bill Clinton can turn off MFN – China’s most-favoured nation status in the US market – and with it growth in Guangdong.’ The British never (so far as I know) grasped this, and never seriously sought to mobilise US interest in democracy and human ...”