Dominic Sandbrook
American Idol
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Viking 928pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
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’.
Goodwin hardly needs any help to shift books, but last year she got it anyway when Barack Obama publicly commended her latest bestseller and announced that he was using it as inspiration as he put his government together. At the time, this sounded like spin: praising the book
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‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
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‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
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