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“... For nearly ten years Americans watched – with mingled fascination, horror, anger and incredulity – as the Iranian Revolution transformed a nation once assumed to be firmly moored to the world of the modern West into an apparent bastion of anti-Western, anti-modern, fundamentalist values. It was an event that seemed to confound the normal patterns of analysis; and the only explanation with which most Americans have since felt comfortable has been one that stresses a cultural irrationality rooted in the oddities of the Islamic mind or the peculiarities of the Persian character ...”

“... About ten years ago, I heard Edward Thompson give a public lecture at Harvard University. He was not then an internationally renowned spokesman for the peace movement: there was at that point no peace movement of any consequence to be a spokesman for. He was, however, one of the most influential historians of his time. Thompson was speaking in one of the university’s largest lecture halls, and the room was full to overflowing ...”

“... Intervention, according to Hedley Bull, is ‘dictatorial or coercive interference, by an outside party or parties, in the sphere of jurisdiction of a sovereign state, or more broadly of an independent political community’. And if there is any principle on which the international community can be said to agree, it is that intervention, so defined, is legally and morally illegitimate ...”

“... The history of the United States since the close of World War Two has so far produced relatively little in the way of academic scholarship and even less in the way of serious scholarly argument. There are, however, two major issues that have produced both: the origins of the Cold War and the Eisenhower presidency – issues that have been the subject of extensive literature and extensive controversy and for which there are now not only well-established orthodox views but fully-developed revisionist stances as well ...”

“... Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale have presented the American electorate with as clear an ideological choice as any set of Presidential candidates in the 20th century. The two men disagree fundamentally on their prescriptions for the economy, their approaches to national defence, their views of foreign policy, their stances on social issues. Above all, they differ in their philosophies of government ...”

“... explained to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau (whose own undercutting we can follow in Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform). This method of human relations worked, paradoxically, better with the women in the President’s private life than with the men in politics. Whereas the men had their own ambitions and agendas, the women were entirely ...”

“... who have effectively stolen their thunder. In America, the situation is more complex – and Alan Brinkley’s book is an excellent guide to these perplexities. When American liberals try to explain why liberalism is in such a parlous condition, they begin with the assumption that liberalism was the common sense of the country from Roosevelt through ...”

“... Luce’s taste for ‘relentless “departmental” organisation’, according to his biographer Alan Brinkley. Time was first to be called Facts, and its research department ‘was the only non-clerical area of the magazine to hire women … and for many years it hired only women.’ An editor wrote the young ladies a cheering memo: Checking is ...”

“... kind of fall: tragic early death. He wrote books about the CIA and the Pentagon, on Clinton and Alan Greenspan, carrying on at the Post as well, making a name for himself as a reporter and author others wished to emulate. He’d brought down a president: journalistically, what can beat that? He’s now more famous and must be wealthier than any other ...”

“... arse. He was also, as it turns out, a part-time novelist. The editors of House of Earth, Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp (yes, that Johnny Depp), describe the recently rediscovered book as Guthrie’s ‘only fully realised novel’. His part-realised novels include, arguably, not only Bound for Glory (1943), his autobiography with added bits of ...”