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“... times, with uneven films such as Easy Rider; or for the murders committed in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. Those could be seen as political – one of the motivations was to provoke a race war – but the horrifying character of Manson and the celebrity of some of the victims were what caught most people’s attention. The fascination with the episode ...”

“... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the ...”

“... the late 1960s: racism, riots, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Russian troop movements, the liberalisation of communism in Czechoslovakia. Where she comes from informs what she sees. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder, she makes a list of ‘Attempted and successful assassinations ...”

“... to the reckless domestic and international adventurism of his liberal successors. Admirers of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and of the dynamism of their years in office interpret the new defence of Eisenhower – correctly – as an assault on their own belief in active, affirmative government, an assault different in its origins but oddly similar in its ...”

“... has still not been taken on board in Britain: they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ...”

“... money came from the Foreign Office via the External Services of the BBC – an idea suggested by Charles Curran, the Director-General of the BBC. The External Services did indeed use Reuters material, but they paid over the odds for it and the high payments amounted to a concealed subsidy. Looking back later, Gerald Long, Reuters chief executive from 1963 to ...”

“... nominally Syrian territory but is currently controlled by Isis. In the view of the historian Hugh Kennedy he wasn’t a significant political actor, but ‘at best an adequate caretaker of what he had inherited. Nor was he a great patron of culture: he left virtually no surviving architecture and it was his son and eventual successor, al-Mamun (813-33), who ...”

“... old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his writing. He was a smoker and drinker and on his third marriage. He had had a couple of minor strokes. In two years he’d be awarded the Nobel ...”

“... who make many species are the “splitters” and those who make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist Joseph Hooker. This first recorded appearance of the handy distinction between those who bundle up the data into one big theory and those who prefer to lay out the exhibits on the table in carefully ...”

“... A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow incisors bared ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... instead a continuing struggle is variously played out between politicians such as Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey, the conservative Church and the women’s movement, or (less convincingly) the ‘big, mad children’ on both sides in the North and the grown-ups. The opposition is clearest in the contrast between Haughey and Garret FitzGerald. FitzGerald ...”

“... about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was more than ...”

“... the press. Caudill showed reporters from the New York Times and CBS News around. In 1963 John F. Kennedy created the Appalachian Regional Commission; in 1964, Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty from a porch in southeastern Kentucky. Over the next 25 years more than $15 billion was spent in Appalachia.It did little to alter the region’s fate. While ...”

“... ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin Theodore ...”