Ronald Reagan: Hanging By Our Thumbs
BBC Radio 4

The first tranche of Jonathan Myerson’s latest assault on recent Republican Party history (12 October) took its title from President Reagan’s remark that if what came to be called the Iran-Contra affair went wrong, those involved would find themselves strung up before the gates of the White House.

To listen to it for even a moment was to be returned to a political imbroglio so murky and doubt-ridden that even the participants had trouble in deciding exactly what had gone on. But if this was the late-1980s equivalent of the Schleswig-Holstein question, then at least most mature listeners will have been in familiar company.