Most presidents have not considered 100 days a significant milepost.

Reagan conspired in the underestimation of his own ability.

When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things.

If it's a good story, it's a good story, and it draws readers in.

I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.

I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.

Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'

The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.

Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.

I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.

The Tea Party loves Reagan because he said exactly what they want to hear.

I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.

I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try.

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

Politics is not something most people have to do every day. Their daily lives are much more influenced by job opportunities, whether the country is in a recession or a boom period. If you really want to understand what drives American history, look at the economic... side.

When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully.

People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don't buy studies of presidencies.

I finally got to watch 'Roots' in my mid-teens, on a video rental. Slowly and meticulously Roots fed its black characters through the mincing machine of American slavery. People with names, hopes and family connections were destroyed and dehumanised before my eyes.

Many anglophone Africans still have deep emotional, economic and often familial links to Britain, but those with money are now as keen to holiday in Dubai as London.