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“... Former First Lady and the Football Hero’, perhaps her most ambitious story, Homes depicts Nancy Reagan visiting online chat rooms so that she can experience anonymity. Why has she resorted to such threadbare territory here? This is Homes’s first novel in six years, and her penetrating critique has given way to self-help truisms: ‘There is no ...”

“... method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as ‘an unblinking look’ at their subjects – which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed. To this end, she has spent four years interviewing ...”

“... story’ was a thing of the past, part of the discarded paraphernalia of the Nixon age. Reagan answered most satisfactorily this essentialist expectation, since as an excellent actor he had no problem in assuming or discarding roles, and could constantly refashion the ‘essential Reagan’ and live each new role ...”

“... and open-minded spirit. Let us by all means approach the Gingrich factor in this way. Way back in Reagan’s first term, I was invited to CNN’s Crossfire studio to debate something or other. The usual form was – and still is – that some right-wing bigmouth would be asked to say how bad Communism or terrorism or child abuse or drug addiction was, and ...”

“... character of the pair, insistent on giving her opinion on everything with pedantic accuracy (Nancy Reagan, thirty years later, couldn’t stand being constantly corrected by her). Taubman makes clear that the combination of her outspokenness and her unshakeable loyalty held her husband together through terrible times, when without her he might have ...”

“... in its infancy, barely a year old and only six months independent of the New York Review, Ronald Reagan didn’t simply take the US presidency from Jimmy Carter: he also, as Danny Goldberg argues in Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit (Miramax, $23.95), wrested political access to pop culture from the Democrats. ...”

“... telling this part of Taylor’s story. Taylor used her longstanding friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan (also Hollywood stars) and the Washington contacts she made during her marriage to Warner to persuade the president to speak at his first Aids event, in 1987. Five years earlier, Reagan’s press secretary had ...”

“... in 1971, presided over the birth of mass incarceration, but there was a dramatic escalation under Reagan, who launched his own War on Drugs in 1982, at a time when less than 2 per cent of Americans considered drugs to be the most important issue facing the country. This was also the year crack arrived, devastating poor black neighbourhoods already shaken by ...”

“... Would you believe,’ asked Ronald Reagan, opening his campaign for Governor in 1966, ‘that 15.1 per cent of the population of California is on welfare?’ A pretty shocking figure, you might think, for the Golden State in the midst of the Vietnam War boom: no wonder Reagan’s well-heeled backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts ...”

“... enough, the final effect of the novel is of exactly the callous indifference that voted in Reagan. She does allow herself to warm a little towards a conspicuous lack of aspiration: towards Donny’s wife, who won’t stop straightening her hair; towards the stubborn hillbillies, who refuse to be told by Raymond what to do with their lives. But she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the recognisable language and manner of Labour Party activists. One guest of the Hatches, Nancy Stillians, is preoccupied with campaign finance reform, and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the ...”

“... appealed because he was able to show how he had assumed all the complicated burdens of office, but Reagan appealed because he was able to show himself as a direct man who had the determination to dominate and solve problems. Carter is not at ease within himself; Reagan is a man who is at ease. Such judgments flow easily from ...”

“... pregnancies ‘that God intended to happen’, they may have outlasted their usefulness. But since Reagan, Republicans’ success in drawing their opponents to the right is undeniable. George McGovern died on 21 October. He lost to Nixon in 1972, calling for a complete withdrawal of US troops from South-East Asia, a 37 per cent cut in defence spending, and an ...”

“... of 59 countries bent on deposing Nicolás Maduro. Was a coup already in progress? At this point, Nancy Pelosi jumped to her feet and clapped. So did the Democratic Party en masse. They would support Trump in this as they had when he bombed Syria, and as, with vague demurrals, they had supported his assassination of the Iranian general Qasem ...”