Where does Jimmy Carter live? Well, close your eyes and imagine the kind of house an ex-president of the United States might live in. The sort of residence befitting the former leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Got it? Right, now scrub that clean from your mind and instead imagine the sort of house where a moderately successful junior accountant and his family might live.

It’s what in America is called a ‘ranch house’, or, as we’d say, ‘a bungalow’. There are no porticoes. No columns. No sweeping lawns. There’s just a small brick single-storey structure that Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, built on Woodland Drive back in 1961 when he was a peanut farmer and she was a peanut farmer’s wife, right in the heart of the town in which they grew up. Though Plains, Georgia is barely a town. A street, might be a more accurate description. A single road going nowhere much.

At the end of the drive there’s a fleet of black Suburbans, giant SUVs with blacked-out windows: not too many junior accountants would have a crack team of secret service agents on site, it’s true. But it’s hard to overstate how modest it is. It’s […]