Miami Beach, Florida, summer of 2008.

The US Presidential election was in full swing, even if the only visible sign of it locally was a poster reading 'Vote Ron Paul'. One balmy midnight, in the Books & Books store on Lincoln Road, I found what I had been looking for: yards and yards of books on American politics. Unable to take more than a few of them home - airline baggage limits tend to see to that - I settled for Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America.

Covering America's "second civil war", it began with the riots in the south LA neighbourhood of Watts in 1965 and carried on until Nixon's landslide victory of 1972, via the Vietnam War, Barry Goldwater, LBJ, the Kennedys, the Kent State shootings, the 1967 Newark riots, the Manson killings, George Wallace and Watergate, and the beginnings of America's sharp political divide we know today.

I was impressed by Perlstein's ravenous magpie's eye for detail, by the assured way in which social, cultural and political history were woven together. Not for the first time, I marvelled at America's kaleidoscopic political and cultural history. I can't explain exactly what it is that has kept me hooked for so long: but there's something about America, and its political process, its institutions, history and larger-than-life characters that I find irresistible.

It's an obsession that has been fuelled by a number of outstanding non-fiction books. The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A Caro's magisterial narration of LBJ's life and career, is remarkably detailed and utterly compelling. "My books are really about political power in America, and no one understood it better than Lyndon Johnson," he said three years ago at the publication of the fourth volume, The Passage Of Power. Caro has devoted decades of his life to researching Johnson's; he has even camped out under the stars in a remote part of Texas, the better to understand some of the impulses that drove young LBJ. Volume four takes the story only up to 1964.

Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein brought down Nixon, has given us a series of meticulously researched books into aspects of political power and the exercising of American military might: Bush At War, Plan Of Attack, State Of Denial, The Price Of Politics, Obama's Wars. Watergate has naturally given rise to many books. America's involvement in Vietnam was addressed in such influential books as Noam Chomsky's American Power And The New Mandarins. I have well-thumbed copies of William Shawcross' Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon And The Destruction Of Cambodia (1979) and Graydon Carter's What We've Lost (2004), a damning indictment of the Bush administration.

America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave rise to Jason Burke's superb The 9/11 Wars, and The End Game by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. The 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections were covered by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in, respectively, Race Of A Lifetime and Double Down, both told with a fly-on-the-wall thoroughness. The 1988 race was the subject of Richard Ben Cramer's magnificent What It Takes.

America's intelligence community has been the subject of many riveting books, from Tim Weiner's CIA history, Legacy Of Ashes, to Top Secret America: The Rise Of The New American Security State by Dana Priest and William M Arkin. The latter probed deep beneath the skin of America's Byzantine security network and was a useful primer before Edward Snowden's astonishing whistleblowing.

Now comes Perlstein's latest, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall Of Nixon And The Rise Of Reagan (Simon & Schuster). It covers the period between 1973 and 1976, during which "America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history". Perlstein's method is as it was in Nixonland: prodigious research, several storylines crisscrossing one another, a gripping account slowly being developed of a critical phase in American politics. Two chapters in and I'm hooked.