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“... has disappeared from all but a handful of American newspapers. Foreign affairs reporters (led by Thomas Friedman, the influential columnist for the New York Times) increasingly accept free-market globalisation theory, automatically blaming the problems of other countries on their failure to be more like the entrepreneurial US. Wall Street stock ...”

“... who drive foreign cars, mock patriotism and advocate abortion and homosexuality on the other: so Thomas Frank argues in What’s the Matter with America? The main economic interest of populist conservatism is to get rid of the strong state, which taxes the population in order to finance regulatory interventions, and to introduce an economic programme ...”

“... don’t just loathe each other culturally: they also have radically clashing economic interests. Thomas Frank’s important and fascinating book on the Republican base in the Midwestern heartland anticipates and tries to answer the riddle posed by the election: why did so many poor white Americans vote for a Republican Party which has become more and ...”

“... writes: ‘Yes, I’d like that very much. That really would be something to look forward to.’ Frank was already weakened and wasted by throat cancer, but my suggestion that we go to watch some cricket at Fenner’s did seem genuinely to appeal to him. There wasn’t much to look forward to by this point. On the appointed day the weather was kind, and ...”

“... being slaughtered to those of the victims of the Holocaust, and of a steer being spared to Anne Frank being spared. They also suggest that there might be an equivalent of Yad Va Shem’s Avenue of Righteousness among the whales: ‘Perhaps whales sing sagas of great acts of sacrifice by whale cows of days gone by.’ Elizabeth Marshall ...”

“... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...”

“... been plenty for evangelicals to complain about even since the triumphs of Bush and Karl Rove. As Thomas Frank argued in 2004 in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the striking thing about the Republican alliance with evangelicals has been the thinness of their legislative achievements: abortion is still legal, campaigners for gay rights have ...”

“... That marvellous line from Thomas Hardy’s ‘At the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word ...”

“... form a substantial electoral bloc that did not consistently pursue its own economic interests. As Thomas Frank noted fifteen years ago in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, such issues have been the Holy Grail of conservative politics for some time. None of the things the culture wars were fought over stuck, until immigration finally did the ...”

“... The story of Doubting Thomas, examined at length in this learned and fascinating book, has its origin in a brief passage near the end of St John’s Gospel. After the crucifixion, when the disciples were assembled behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus appeared among them and displayed the wounds in his hands and side ...”

“... living with his parents in the great American heartland, seeing no one but family. He alone, Thomas Lucchesi, the relentless reader and rumoured writer among them, would journey beyond his small city’s environs, often to distant and remote parts of the country, but only to succour dying friends – chums he’d not seen since college days, who had long ...”

“... a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the lives of the saints of middle management, Leadbeater’s magnificent pilgrims are full of daring. They struggle for personal fulfilment and venture ...”

“... that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been ...”

“... or more you can choose which book you get (comedian, football fan and former English teacher Frank Skinner has apparently made an early bid for Johnson’s Dictionary). You also get a certificate and the chance to attend an annual ‘meet your book’ event. Thousands of books are slowly turning to dust, and current funding for conservation is so low ...”

“... with broken ice and rubbish. Penelope Fitzgerald’s hero is a quiet, thoughtful Englishman, Frank Reid, born and brought up in the city and running a small printing business inherited from his father. The tragi-comedy of Frank’s domestic difficulties is played out, often ironically, against this enormous, turbulent ...”