This is an important and timely book. Its thesis, remorselessly maintained, is that Rupert Murdoch's newspapers are "pseudo-newspapers", sustained by a "kitsch ideology" of bogus anti-establishment rhetoric; that Murdoch himself has built a career, like his father before him, on relationships with government that are an unedifying mixture of intimidation and toadying.

At a moment when the Blair administration (to judge from Tessa Jowell's latest pronouncements) seems to be adopting [...]

In December 1845, the editor of the New York Morning News proclaimed that it was the "manifest destiny" of the United States to "overspread and possess the whole of the continent". It is hard for us now to realise how far that destiny then was from fulfilment. Within three years, Texas and the present states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado would have been captured from Mexico in a [...]

A spectre haunts Europe. Today, it is not the ghost of communism, but the ghost of fascism. So now, when the far right wins a shocking victory, whether it be in Austria or Italy, in the first round of the French presidential elections or in local elections in Lancashire, the numbing fear that lies just under the surface of discussion is always the fear of Hitler.

The rise of the [...]

For 50 years, from Pearl Harbor to the final deliquescence of the Soviet Union, the United States stood at Armageddon and did battle for the Lord against the vast forces of totalitarian evil. Suddenly, the age of trial was over. The question for the thoughtful was: what now?

Two schools of thought quickly emerged. Very well, said one. We have seen off imperial militarism in the shape of the Romanovs [...]

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont made their celebrated tour of America. They were young, aristocratic and rather solemn. (When he admitted that he visited "beautiful women", Tocqueville felt obliged to add "solely for the purpose of resting ourselves, I swear".) His goal was to study American prisons, then admired by idealists in Europe. In nine months, the two young Frenchmen travelled in 17 of [...]

On 17 March 1904, St Patrick's Day, the president of the United States marched in the traditional parade up Fifth Avenue at the head of the Rough Riders, the volunteers he had led to war in Cuba six years earlier. It was the unforgettable Theodore Roosevelt, whose gruff machismo and penchant for slaughtering the biggest game he could find sat oddly with his learning and his languages. He wrote almost [...]

No one can fairly accuse the American news media of not knowing how to forgive. For all the years of his political life, Richard Nixon hated the media. His private conversation boiled with anger towards journalists, and these savage resentments would erupt into his public discourse. When he lost the election for governor of California, he told the assembled reporters: "Well, gentlemen, you won't have Nixon to kick around any [...]