' Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn't brilliant today' - sang a loquacious stripper in Rodgers and Hart's 1940 musical Pal Joey, assuming the audience would recognise the name of America's most celebrated political columnist and laugh at her daring to find him less than inspired. But since his death in 1974 this towering figure - presidential confidant, public philosopher, journalist extraordinary - has been plummeting towards oblivion, to be retrieved by Ronald Steel in his biography Waiter Lippmann and the American Century, which Esmond Wright, Director of the Institute of United States Studies at London University, examines in this talk.