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“... pages, full of this kind of upfront bitchiness, will already know, this is an indictment of Nancy Reagan composed by the vacuum-cleaner method. Five years of ‘meticulous’ research and over a thousand interviews have been sucked into the Kitty machine so as to give us the accumulated dirt. The book has been enormously successful, justifying its ...”

“... decently veiled. It is the question of public expectation, and how to meet it, that bedevilled Nancy Reagan during her time in the White House. ‘By the end of 1981,’ she tells us, ‘I had a higher disapproval rating than any first lady of modern times.’ Joan Didion called her smile ‘a study in frozen insincerity’. Gloria Steinem called her ...”

“... Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the rest of me?, repeated the question the actor had asked in the movie King’s Row, when he woke up in a hospital bed to discover that his legs had been amputated. Reagan lost his legs in Hollywood, the autobiography explains, and recovered ‘the rest of me’ (that phrase is the leitmotif of his text) by fighting Communist influence there, acquiring personal and institutional backing, and marrying Nancy Davis ...”

“... race unopposed; deployment as the resident ‘worrywart’ in the Nixon and Ford administrations; Reagan picking him as a running mate in 1980 to avoid being pushed by the party into standing with Ford as an effective co-president. As president, Dad won the Cold War: he’s a second Churchill. The grievances take in Nixon, for the ‘putrid swamp’ of ...”

“... threats and innuendo. His main characteristic was cynicism. And yet his friends included Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Norman Mailer, Barbara Walters (they almost married), Cardinal Spellman, nearly all the top Mafia people, Richard Nixon, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, an endless list of Congressmen and ...”

“... an antidote to the incessant slogans of the war on drugs that were broadcast during our youth: Nancy Reagan telling us ‘Just say no.’ It was a campaign in which Joe Biden was an architect and collaborator. The months Hunter spent partying at the Chateau Marmont and then, after he was kicked out, in a succession of lesser boutique hotels, are ...”

“... in this modern nomenclature, such as those named after First Ladies – the Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton – and a whole subculture surrounding the orchid world: orchid baby-sitters, orchid doctors, even orchid boarding-houses, as well as a virtual cosmos of orchidodelirium on the Internet. Orlean shows how the contemporary cult ...”

“... Prep was never more significant than in the debates of 1980 and 1984, in both of which Ronald Reagan’s surrogate opponent was David Stockman, a young former radical who went on to head the Office of Management and Budget before resigning over the budget deficit in Reagan’s second term. Stockman had been employed by ...”

“... The therapeutic hopes aroused by stem-cell research, however, have shifted political alignments. Nancy Reagan, mourning her husband’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, received public support when she endorsed the expansion of stem-cell research. More recently, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, a former heart surgeon who’s expected to run for ...”

“... the Palladium and Las Vegas, appears with Dean Martin and Les Dawson, is introduced to President Reagan. Something is amiss, though. Even Nancy Reagan notices it. ‘My word,’ she says, ‘you’re terribly thin, my dear.’ Then she adds: ‘Well, never mind. A girl can never be too thin.’ At a later ...”

“... made for television by Haley Barbour, the Party’s national chairman. The appearance by Nancy Reagan spoke for itself. The elevation of Colin Powell into some sort of co-candidate and the exceptional prominence given to Elizabeth Dole, who made the most of her opportunity by wading into the crowd on the floor to do her husband’s This Is Your ...”

“... Best Man, a play that I had written about a Presidential convention. An agent had suggested Ronald Reagan for the lead. We all had a good laugh. He is by no means a bad actor, but he would hardly be convincing, I said with that eerie prescience which has earned me the title the American Nostradamus, as a Presidential candidate. Vidal’s literary opinions are ...”

“... the disparate elements of the American Right into the great crusade which was to culminate in Reagan’s election in 1980. Rising Tide was warmly greeted by Barry Goldwater and its columns featured articles by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline ...”

“... of First Ladyhood and a Frank Sinatra-hosted inaugural party. All the things, in short, for which Nancy Reagan was later to be lampooned. But, as anyone who has ever argued with a fan will swiftly appreciate, nothing is wrong if a Kennedy does it. ‘Class’, you see. ‘American royalty’ is the phrase most often and – for my money – most aptly ...”

“... 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 ...”