With much of the world’s attention focused on the US political scene during 2024, a book that offers some useful context is The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself (published by Bloomsbury, RRP $37) by Neil Bryant, the BBC’s New York correspondent. He accepts that the country’s political polarisation has reached an apex – or perhaps nadir – but he notes that division and belligerence have been a part of American political culture for a long time, going back to the constitutional debates and encompassing the Civil War.