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’.

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