“... of his friends up to my mother. The man stood at the end of her bed with his trousers undone. ‘Tony said it would be OK,’ he said. These drunken friends sometimes visited our house on their days off work, but when my father went to the front door – groggy, doing up his dressing-gown – he didn’t recognise them and sent them away. Fights broke out on ...”

“... supply-led food bank?’ another peer wanted to know. Freud wrote the Lex column in the FT before Tony Blair asked him to lead an independent review of the benefits system (he completed a draft in three weeks, despite admitting he ‘didn’t know anything about welfare at all’), so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘If that sounded ...”

“... Pasmore’s composition stops and starts. Perhaps only in the pictures of Wendy Blood, a pink-and-white blonde whom he married in 1940, is there a sense of unselfconscious connection between painter and subject, though even here Pasmore said that he was cocking a snook at Renoir’s sugary nudes. His career would seem to have owed something to the inferiority ...”

“... to them, for the sake of its own violently enacted and no less violently preserved self-regard. Tony Blair’s increasingly desperate statements of conviction would then simply be an inflated example of the trend. ‘I believe in myself’ is the last great performative statement of an idealist on the rocks. It also exposes the lie since, believing in ...”

“... after Labour’s defeat in the 1970 General Election did Benn break with the Wilsonian agenda. The white heat of the technological revolution had cooled. Benn did not dissimulate his ambition to lead the Labour Party, and as late as 1975 Wilson could flatter and cajole Benn by saying: ‘I’ve got to do this. When you have my job, you’ll have to do ...”

“... increased the importance of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the ...”

“... over Niagara Falls. The incident caused disquiet in Washington. British forces, having torched the White House and Capitol in 1814, were again intervening on US territory. Diplomatic representations culminated in an exchange of letters between Lord Ashburton, special minister for the negotiations, and Daniel Webster, the US Secretary of State. They agreed that ...”

“... I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 March. One of the lowest moments this year was Tony Blair and Jack Straw misrepresenting the French and German position on Iraq in order to encourage xenophobia and get more support from the Murdoch papers.17 March. A bin Laden associate reported as being ‘quizzed’ by American agents in Pakistan. Were ...”

“... annual St George’s Day celebrations in West Bromwich, a carnival of England flags and red and white face painting in 2018, and a Tesla showroom in New York in 2023, have taken on new resonance since the beginning of this year. Observation turns to nostalgia while he works. Chew Stoke: A Year in the Life of an English Village was published in 1992, a ...”

“... camaraderie, the Tories in particular looking with each passing year increasingly like a gaggle of white-collar criminals on day release for a family wedding. Quite how this whole event is a triumph for British democracy is hazy to me. Perhaps the only people who know for sure are the tourists listening to descriptions of the event on their language-friendly ...”

“... constructed around a set piece. Two of these concern gun violence, which Dorothy calls ‘the white noise of American life’. In the first part, Dorothy and Sword take shelter in a classroom after an active shooter alert pops up on their phones. They agree that it’s probably just a drill, but they can’t help being scared, and to distract themselves ...”

“... concern itself with such mundanities, but here is the point at which history most needs defending: Tony Blair’s airy, but essentially Thatcherite dismissal of ‘Old Britain’, and the Government’s perpetuation of a higher education funding system whereby, in the most literal sense, British history will not be able to reproduce itself in the future, are ...”

“... In his latest novel, Stormy Weather, Hiaasen takes less than a hundred pages to dispose of Tony Torres, the scumbag mobile-home salesman who utters the fatal phrase: ‘Let’s have a drinky poo.’ But Corso is stuck with it for life, it’s part of the texture, the rap. Back in the late Forties and early Fifties, when he sat in coffee shops and dyke ...”

“... of Cuba, constitutes a black community. From their local situation, their past of slavery and white domination, and from the information they hear on the radio and television concerning the social and political activity of the mass of the population in advanced countries, this body of people has derived political ideas and aspirations which their rulers ...”

“... Jocelyn has known or worked with. There is music that has been specially composed, a poem by Tony Harrison, the theme of which is all the toasts he and Jocelyn have drunk together in all the various places where they have worked around the world. They’re due to set off on Monday on another epic journey, the script, based on the Prometheus legend, is ...”