American politics

From ugly duckling into swan – the remarkable transformation of Pamela Digby

14 September 2024 9:00 am

The plump teenager who married Randolph Churchill soon turned herself into a ravishing beauty – to become the 20th century’s most influential seductress

Born in the USA: how Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album bridged the American political divide

27 July 2024 9:00 am

Steven Hyden traces the impact of the title song, whose coruscating verses and affirmatory choruses cut both ways, and made its creator for a time the world’s greatest rock star

Is Gone with the Wind to blame for Trumpism?

2 July 2022 9:00 am

Selfish, acquisitive, ignorant and vain, Gone with the Wind’s heroine not only resembles Donald Trump – she may even be his role model, says Greg Garrett

This Trump satire is too soft on Sleepy Joe and Cackling Kamala: The 47th at the Old Vic reviewed

23 April 2022 9:00 am

Trump is said to be a gift for bad satirists and a problem for good ones. He dominates Mike Bartlett’s…

AOC, America’s youngest congresswoman, has already been compared with FDR and JFK

9 April 2022 9:00 am

‘Who is AOC?’ the back cover of this book asks. ‘A wack job!’ says Donald Trump. ‘She needs to run…

Where are the Henry Kissingers when we need them?

16 May 2020 9:00 am

It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that…

You’ll keep saying ‘I’m sorry, did I hear that correctly?’: Fiasco reviewed

28 March 2020 9:00 am

Kevin Katke was quite a man. He had no military training, no political background and no espionage experience. Nonetheless, his…

Oracles, perverts and the Dirtbag Left

7 March 2020 9:00 am

For 500 years the State Oracle of Tibet has worked as a kind of angry immortal advisor to the Dalai…

Hillary Clinton’s autobiography seems destined to join her husband’s - in a bin marked ‘Free’

21 June 2014 8:00 am

Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists…

Hillary, Obama, Osama — and a hapless Bill

22 February 2014 9:00 am

The actor David Niven was once badgered by the American columnist William F. Buckley to introduce him to Marc Chagall,…

Edmund Burke (left) and Thomas Paine, caricatured by Gillray and Cruickshank respectively

Where did the Right and the Left come from? 

15 February 2014 9:00 am

What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the…

The wounded Kennedy – and the people who gave him strength

23 November 2013 9:00 am

Ten years ago, a determined historian transformed our picture of John F. Kennedy. Robert Dallek had finally got his hands…