Barack Obama's not good at all on TV. His body language is all wrong... And he has this strange, literal, nose-in-the-air look ... like someone who's turned up for Plato's Symposium and finds himself in Big Brother. He does have a very friendly, easy manner in small gatherings. There's just something rigidly professorial about it. The Republican bet is that, if they can get it back to small politics, the cult of affinity - 'Who would you rather have round to dinner?' - then they'll win.

[on the subject of American religion the Atlantic feels at its widest] partly because we've come such a long way from Victorian piety... The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.

I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body. The antidote to [Robert Putnam's book] 'Bowling Alone' is absolutely school and church." [the twin pillars of a neighbourliness that flourishes in New England as it seldom still does in the old one.] "I remember when we moved into Moon Hill [in Massachusetts], the mail box was not big enough to take the cakes and cookies which said, 'Hello!'. It wouldn't have happened in the Cowley Road.

[If Barack Obama is elected, the rest of the world may have a shock.] I don't know what they expect from him, but the notion that then there'll be Nelson Mandela or something will not happen. They have to understand that he's an intense American patriot. [In Afghanistan] he will run that war very, very hard; harder than George W. Bush - and the world may not like that.