Although little known in Britain, Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the American public’s favourite popular historians. Her career began in bizarre circumstances: as a young White House intern in the Lyndon Johnson years, she became a kind of muse to the troubled president, who poured out his social and political anxieties in a string of late-night (though chaste) encounters. That gave her the material for her first book, and since then she has become the epitome of that peculiarly American breed, the non-academic ‘presidential historian’.

Literary Review

Feb 2009

Categories

Dominic Sandbrook

Get with the Programme

Goodbye to All That

Juicy QC

Big Game Hunter

The Curtain Falls

Rules for Literary Survival

In Congress

The Beat Goes On

Country House Don

Streets of Shame

All Change, Please

Go West

Regarding Henry

Little Boy From Germany

When the Lights Went Out

History of the Present

Most Agreeable

Class of 1979

Pizza Politics

King Dubya

Busting the Myth

That Special Relationship

Dark Content

Soaked in 007