Search Results

“... his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything that might ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... he is left scanning the guerrilla movements of the 1960s from a great distance. The contrast with Richard Gott’s Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (first published in 1971) is striking. Brown’s grasp of US policy, with all its subtleties and contradictions, seems uncertain too. On the overthrow of Argentina’s president Arturo Frondizi in March ...”

“... like so many other members of the political class in Britain, or did they become, as the title of Richard Griffiths’s illuminating book on the subject puts it, ‘fellow-travellers of the right’? Given the passionate commitment of George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the Allied cause and the crucial role they played in bolstering morale during the Blitz by ...”

“... However, as the 1960s began, Rugoff continues, artists associated with Pop and photorealism – Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Richard Artschwager, Vija Celmins and Malcolm Morley – turned again to photography, not only as a source of images but as a way to convey the look of consumer society, already ...”

“... mechanisms of character. Big things are happening – we soon hear that Wheeler is on the Robert Kennedy campaign trail, and they follow him west – yet Rose is more than ever alert to the influence of her own past on the new life she is trying to imagine for herself. Her reveries, many of them about fathers and memories, are the best moments in the ...”

“... and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious campaign as ...”

“... six and eight million people … The current muster has Robin Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy ...”

“... quotations from our national leaders are no longer the inspirational homilies of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy – ‘You have nothing to fear, but fear itself’ or ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ – but the exposed whoppers of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ...”

“... something Morley has been investigating for more than twenty years, JFK’s assassination. The Kennedy assassination is a notoriously tricky subject for researchers and The Ghost helps us to see why. Attempts to say who really killed Kennedy go quickly at first but then the vast universe of available information takes ...”

“... the literary-prize-winning league, tell us of areas with which we are probably unfamiliar. William Kennedy’s Ironweed is about Albany, capital of the State of New York. Julian Barnes writes about the France of Gustave Flaubert, as discussed in an irrational, pedantic manner by a British admirer of Flaubert’s work. Anita Desai, daughter of a German mother ...”

“... written by McGovern’s speechwriter, Robert Schrum, who later went to work for Edward Kennedy) was at least as good as the speech made by President Carter in 1980, even though Carter’s chief speechwriter and other aides spent over two months preparing two series of drafts, an ‘A’ series for Jimmy and Rosalynn and a ‘B’ series for the ...”

“... to give teeth to the Alliance for Progress, the American-sponsored attempt devised during the Kennedy era to push back the tide of ‘Castro-Communism’ that seemed about to engulf the continent. Backed by radicals within the Vatican and the State Department (and by governments in Paris, Rome and Bonn), President Frei seized large landholdings that had ...”

“... security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that. Not only was Hoover, as head of the FBI, America’s leading policeman: he enjoyed an extraordinary ...”

“... New Orleans, the setting for Sallis’s Griffin novels, is a mob town with murky connections to Kennedy conspiracies, voodoo, vampire faggots, jazz, child brothels and all the trash, black and white, of the Delta. It wasn’t a place – with its ‘meaty, rich smell of frying shrimp’, its ‘palms, hibiscus, yucca trees and rubber plants’ – to be ...”