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“... to come out with the heartless nonsense whose purpose in the end is to serve power. Of Theodore White, the famous chronicler of American Presidents whose death occasioned reams of adulatory prose, Cockburn says that his contribution to the grotesque cult of Reagan was central, and consisted of preparing the public with pious cant about ‘abundance ...”

“... famous line, which dates from 1933, was, as Black reminds us, quite possibly a reference to Theodore Roosevelt rather than Franklin. But FDR was certainly no systematic thinker. Asked to define his philosophy, he said: ‘I’m a Christian and a Democrat – that’s all.’ Turn-of-the-century Progressivism provided Roosevelt with much of his ...”

“... have been the foundation of the storied ‘Reagan revolution’?Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are ...”

“... and introduce a thoroughgoing parliamentary system. On the way, the essays discuss Edmund Wilson, the Oz books, V.S. Pritchett, Hollywood, Theodore Roosevelt and various other topics and people. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of what Vidal is up to is to look at the title essay. This is a piece in heroic bad ...”

“... matriarchy – for instance, muscular Christianity, macho college sports, Social Darwinism and Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick. Douglas is a feminist, but in an unusually moderate and judicious fashion; for example, she doesn’t hesitate to comment severely on the racism of contemporary women’s movements. Naturally she doesn’t unequivocally admire ...”

“... the First World War: ‘perhaps the “arid pacifist”’ – Kipling’s description of Woodrow Wilson – ‘finally decided to go to war after reciting “If” at his shaving mirror’); but it could also repel. Kipling was essentially a foreigner in the Britain of his day. One of his purposes in coming to England in the late 1880s was to wake its people ...”

“... practice, who baulks at the idioms of introspection. In ‘July 1964’, prompted by the death of Theodore Roethke, a confessional poet his criticism never tarried over, he writes: The practice of an art is to convert all terms into the terms of art. By the end of the third stanza death is a smell no longer; it is a problem of style. A man who ought to know ...”

“... debated socialism with Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells … became the éminence grise to Woodrow Wilson’s own alter ego, Colonel House’), the presidents, kings and leaders he knew, the great events he witnessed at very close quarters, the papers, books and journals he produced, the careers he espoused or helped, the ideas, issues, problems he encountered ...”

“... that he was not a militarist, but rather the peaceable son of a Quaker and an admirer of Woodrow Wilson, Nixon now demonstrated his carefully rehearsed ability to use chopsticks. Though unable to hold his drink, Nixon also survived the toasting. The latter ordeal, famous for felling Western visitors to Communist countries, was opened by Zhou, who raised his ...”

“... out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th century, in which the Yellow Peril seemed ...”

“... as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business but also of big government, except as a regulator ...”

“... of information on life in Russia (‘What a very Tourguéneffish effect the samovar gives!’ Theodore Colville exclaims in William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer, set in Florence). But he was most admired for the poignancy of his work. ‘Read Lisa [A Nest of Gentlefolk] if you want your heart really broken,’ Colville tells the young woman who ...”

“... and confronted corporate capitalism. Its memory would inspire the Democratic Party from Woodrow Wilson (elected in 1912) to Franklin Roosevelt (1932) and Lyndon Johnson (1964). More than a century later, Democratic candidates still criss-cross the country trying to rekindle the lost Populist magic. In fact, the present campaign season has seen even some ...”

“... trying for a half a century to distinguish the writer from the talking ghost, and some – Edmund Wilson, for instance – found it easier to do the trick than Hemingway himself. When he was young, he worked very hard at never saying anything the way anybody else would say it, and his success was remarkable. Later he often managed to do it again, when the ...”

“... and the struggle between the classes did not exist.’ Set against the fierce muckraking of Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson, another critic complained, Cather’s fiction was ‘harmless stuff that “could be read in schools and women’s clubs”’. Her Flaubertian classicism (and concomitant moral irony) went mostly unrecognised, and despite ...”