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“... 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 citizenship and the right to vote? What should be the status of the four ...”

“... On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted ...”

“... It’s odd to think that Abraham Lincoln was killed by an actor, because most of the memorable American Presidents to follow him were actors in their blood. Eisenhower excelled in the part of the sturdy veteran who’d come home to tidy the porch, and Nixon was every part in The Godfather rolled into one. But it took Ronald Reagan to drive the matter past the point of absurdity: president of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as star of Bedtime for Bonzo ...”

“... array of reforms undertaken between 1863 and 1877 to refashion a fractured nation.In 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves then resident in jurisdictions involved in the rebellion against the federal government. Until this point, Lincoln had gone out of his way to make clear that ...”

“... almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its emancipation of the slaves. President Lincoln was not willing to sacrifice the slaves to secure peace, but the opposition party, led by one of his former generals, was eager to do so. And so were the voters, worn down by three years of casualties and drafts. ...”

“... A recent episode in a jobbing writer’s life found me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times over the last fifteen years ...”

“... that no American president is ever as much a man of principle as legend would hope. Abraham Lincoln was the very thing Kerry is accused of being by his opponents, a ‘flip-flopper’, someone who moved his emphasis, or changed his description of what he was doing, or just plain changed his position, according to how the wind was blowing. ‘I will ...”

“... deceit. ‘I don’t know how I can demonstrate my remorse,’ Glass is reported to have said to Andrew Sullivan, the editor who hired him. Sullivan pointed out, not in so many words, that taking a giant book advance and allowing a film to be made from the story of your misdemeanours might not be the subtlest demonstration of remorse. Next came Jayson Blair ...”

“... the single-term administrations of John Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to preserve the institution of slavery from the meddling of Abraham ...”

“... period for parole, aimed at decreasing it. Some local prisons such as Oxford, Bedford and Lincoln are vastly overcrowded, holding in Oxford’s case more than double the number of prisoners it should. The Home Office itself believed that the prison population wouldn’t reach 48,000 until 1991, but continues to hope that the current building ...”

“... and moral righteousness to make the world safe for democracy. Like Ferguson, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton begin with the premise that the US has always been an empire. But in contrast to Ferguson’s brief, sanitised account of US history, which leaves the impression that the country’s territorial expansion on the North American continent took place ...”

“... of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference that the man on the bridge was Andrew Johnson and not Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and not McKinley, Mrs Wilson and not Woodrow Wilson, Truman and not Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White ...”

“... name the greatest figure in world history’, they had ranked him fifth, after Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jesus Christ and Washington. Endorsing his appointment, the New York Times described MacArthur as ‘a superb strategist and an inspired leader; a man of infinite patience and quiet stability under adverse pressure; a man equally capable of bold and ...”

“... sign of the South returning. Political control of the region has reverted to the party of Abraham Lincoln; and that party in 2010 is heavily involved in the celebration of Confederate History Month. The new orthodoxy of the Republican South holds that the Civil War was not about slavery so much as ‘economic disagreements’. This extrusion from the ideology ...”

“... bit of fluff to being a noted contributor to the annals of international gossip, falling out with Lincoln Kirstein and Cecil Beaton almost as fast as others, recently arrived in these worlds within the world, were befriending them. I’m not sure which of them is worse, or better. But Isherwood could outdo them all for gossip. He gossiped his way from one end ...”