Every time I do something un-environmental, I think of Jonathon Porritt. He is the embodiment of my guilt. The other day, the phenomenon was given a twist by my reading a column of his. It was uppermost in a mulch of Guardian pages left behind by a passenger on a short haul flight I was taking. Read more ›

In my earlier post on Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland I sort of conveyed the book’s message but I didn’t trouble to get across how good the book is, or tackle the way it describes how the voting went in the 1972 Nixon/McGovern election. It matters because Perlstein says some of the same factors are still at work, though plenty aren’t. Read more ›

If you liked Donald Draper in Madmen, maybe you should like poor old Richard Nixon. After all, a big bit of that brilliant show was to do with Don’s work for Nixon in the 1960 election which saw John F Kennedy elected. Don seemed to feel that whatever you felt about Nixon, his was a classic American poor-boy story of the kind voters ought to be able to identify with. Not so JFK, with his silver spoon. In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein fleshes out this picture. Read more ›

Barry Goldwater, handsome, manly, outspoken. Just the character we could do with in politics today. Yet forty years ago, he was a bogeyman for my generation. So it did me a lot of good to read Pure Goldwater, an anthology of the great man’s own, mostly informal, writing. Read more ›