“... into passing a law to limit the reporting of evidence in divorce cases. As this book reminds us, Tony Blair raised a loud laugh against the Lords by summarising the vicissitudes of a latter-day noble creation. The first of the line bought his peerage from Lloyd George, the second was a Nazi sympathiser and the third ‘was a jailbird who had first ...”

“... ever more intimate political relationships at the centre of power, even compared to the days when Tony Blair was ruling the country with the aid of his former pupil master and his former flatmate (and perhaps his wife as well). Of course, politics has always been about personal connections and private vendettas, but the current narrowing of the political ...”

“... of more than six hundred men and boys at Guantanamo Bay has likewise been brushed aside. Even Tony Blair’s pleas for the repatriation of the British citizens – a selectivity of concern that Lord Steyn rightly condemned – have as yet produced no results. Those who harbour hope for a fair trial for Saddam need only look to America’s ‘legal ...”

“... from a few days in Donegal. Her car had been sitting outside the house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on ...”

“... Benn, who had very different views on these and other matters before he assumed the title of ‘Tony Benn’, also leaned in the same direction. Young quotes the Crossman Diaries: ‘Tony Wedgwood Benn made an extremely good speech asking what was European about us and what was American and whether the Anglo-American ...”

“... but only after the Canary Wharf bomb – and this sent quite the wrong message to the IRA. The Blair Government has shown fewer qualms. As time has gone by, both the British and Irish Governments have come to accept that the success of the more politically-oriented elements of the IRA in carrying the hard-liners with them has depended on putting off ...”

“... by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which is, let’s not forget, still in power. The phenomenon seemed odd when it began – Lance Price was called in front of a Parliamentary ...”

“... interested in wrecking John Major’s media legislation than anything else, and had procured from Tony Blair a promise that once in power he would dilute any such legislation. McKnight also argues – convincingly – that were Murdoch interested only in the opinion polls he would have supported Labour in 1992. Instead, his campaign against them was ...”

“... few achieve media ubiquity without being turned on, in one way or another – whether they’re Tony Blair, David Beckham, Princess Diana or Kate McCann. For Burn, celebrity is an irresistible force that always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is ...”

“... long been the subjects of complaints to the UK by the regimes they had fled. After 9/11, however, Tony Blair professed a desire to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President Bush. It would have been difficult to match Bush’s executive onslaught on constitutional rights in the US, by means of the Patriot Act; the designation of ‘enemy ...”

“... book next to Debonnaire von Bismarck. Conrad Black (with more than a dozen numbers) is next to Tony Blair (home number only) and the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg (who also lived on Tom Wolfe’s street). There are lots of British socialites (brought to him by his friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late newspaper magnate and ...”

“... politician and social thinker, is now likely to find many sympathisers. One of them used to be Tony Blair, who thought well of The Rise of the Meritocracy, while misreading it. He was all for the meritocracy, and the author was not. Current themes and anxieties were in ample evidence in 1957-59. The two main parties were already at blows over ...”

“... so they translated that into a trust in his integrity.’ Ahern had already imitated his friend Tony Blair by pledging to step down before the next general election. But the Mahon tribunal interrupted his dignified path towards retirement. Earlier this year, it found records of lodgments made by Ahern’s secretary, Grainne Carruth, into building ...”

“... was that. But watching her at the party conference last week, I think she agrees with them.’ Tony Blair must know the feeling. The Labour Conference, for so long a squashed, sat-on affair, was this year remarkable for the degree of good feeling uniting members and the leadership – always excepting a thinning middle stratum of recalcitrant MPs ...”

“... in 2010 – a moment when BP’s very future seemed in doubt – Baku was one of the first places Tony Hayward, the then CEO, visited to garner support.Azerbaijan’s oilfields were originally auctioned off by Alexander II in the second half of the 19th century. But when the Baku Commune seized power in 1917, a week after the October Revolution, it ...”