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America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town - from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford - America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.

In comparison with other men of their time, the Americans were distinguished by the possession of new political and social ideas, which were destined to be the foundation of the American commonwealth.

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.

The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar-American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the World Court, the United Nations - these were all ideas of the progressive left.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I'm deeply inspired by all of his work - I rip him off constantly.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

It is curious that the two best-known British historians in the United States are Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, each of whom represents, in fact, a different school of serious historical writing, and both of whom seem to have gained for themselves, perhaps without intending to, a special reputation on the American right.