After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West Wing series could do a lot worse than watch the films below.

The first is Nixon (1995), Oliver’s epic three-and-a-half hour movie starring Anthony Hopkins as America’s disgraced 37th president – a surprisingly generous portrayal of a man as reviled by the Left, in his day, as Donald Trump is now. In a film much better than the usual biopic-by-numbers, Stone and Hopkins give us Nixon in all his complexity: spiteful, considerate, petty and broadminded, self-pitying and courageous (the list goes on). Hopkins may not look or sound like the real Nixon yet makes a completely plausible stand-in, as a man tormented by his own inadequacy – seething with resentment against his rich, better-looking opponent Jack Kennedy, forever uncomfortable in his own skin, hunched and defensive against the world. Yet he’s also a political giant, addicted to intrigue as a kind of creativity and desperate to ‘give History a nudge.’ Brooding and lavish, with a stellar cast and a score by John Williams, Nixon’s 150 or so minutes fairly zip by.

If Trump’s bark has often proved worse than his bite, the same could scarcely said of his Texan predecessor

An interesting companion piece to Stone’s film – the flipside to it, in fact – is David Leaf’s 2006 documentary The US vs John Lennon, which views the Nixon years through the lens of the counterculture: the Black Panthers,........

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