“... two sons, followed his brother, Leslie, to Eton, where he was a contemporary and friend of Eric Blair. In later life he was much irritated by questions from the compilers of the ‘Orwelliad’, as he called them, asking him for his impressions of a person who, as he pointed out, he had not by then seen for 77 years. This didn’t stop him from supplying ...”

“... his debonair host John Mortimer and his lovely wife and other famous guests like Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair and their lovely wives just happened to be in Tuscany when Robertson took a phone call and at once accepted the Guardian’s brief for the Hamilton libel action. Reporters, especially good ones like David Leigh, should hire colour-blind subs. More ...”

“... understand, they’ve attempted to modernise using replicas made with imported moulds. Think of Tony Blair abolishing the office of Lord Chancellor by press release in 2003. The Lord Chancellor’s department was immediately reformed and replaced by a Department for Constitutional Affairs, which lasted only until 2007, when it morphed into a ...”

“... of the Council of Europe and is preparing to host the G8 summit, to be attended by George Bush, Tony Blair and other world leaders, in St Petersburg later this month. This incongruity is hard to fathom, just as it is hard to understand how European governments – in spite of their much touted commitment to human rights and the rule of law – can ...”

“... differently, and rightly so. Recent indignation over the ‘co-option’ of royal events by Tony Blair highlights the uses to which politicians can put the monarchy; it is hard to see why Prime Ministers would continue the ritual of the weekly interview with the sovereign if they found it entirely without purpose. From the other perspective, if the ...”

“... and citizens sharing equally what Mair calls an ‘anti-political sentiment’. In 2000 Tony Blair could say with a straight face, ‘I was never really in politics,’ while a member of his cabinet trumpeted the ‘depoliticising of key decision-making’. In practice, such talk meant that politicians were trying to cut loose from their own ...”

“... immigrants won’t ‘integrate’. This shameful state of affairs was legitimised in 2005 by Tony Blair in the White Paper Controlling Our Borders: Making Migration Work for Britain: ‘Tolerance [is] under threat from those … abusing our hospitality.’ Faced with a moral panic about alien hordes pouring into Britain from the Russian Empire, the ...”

“... Unionists to bring about just such a power-sharing solution in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Tony Blair himself has made it clear that more attention was paid to Sinn Féin than to the SDLP at least in some degree because the former represented part of a violent, armed movement: The SDLP thought that they often got ignored because we were too busy ...”

“... work self-deceived? And why do postmodern writers make it so exasperatingly difficult to say that Tony Blair really did hoodwink the British public over Iraq? There is a form of literary critique that takes this problem on board, though Felski’s book does not address this head-on. For disciples of the late Yale critic Paul de Man, there is a sense in ...”

“... threatened. ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ have been among its guiding concepts (in 2005, Tony Blair was able to win a general election with the vacuous campaign slogan ‘Forward not back’). In rejecting knowledge of the future, Brexitists are saying no to such a politics and to the assumptions about social change on which it rests. Theirs is ...”

“... as much as it does Le Pen. For the left, Macron isn’t just a French version of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair – a supposedly progressive politician who extols the free market and has sold out to big business. He also conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have ...”

“... at the end of April one poll had Theresa May on 61 per cent (higher than Thatcher in 1983 and Blair in 2001) and Corbyn on 26 per cent. It also had the Tories on 49 per cent for voting intention and Labour on 23 per cent. Figures of this sort are typical. It’s even possible that Wales will be lost to the Tories, though they haven’t won a majority ...”

“... her any better); her speeches were greeted with jeers and she was called a ‘stupid cow’ by Tony Marlow, one of John Major’s Maastricht rebels (there’s a video of this on YouTube: Marlow looks very pleased with himself, especially when he manages to repeat the remark after the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, asks him whether he’d used ‘unparliamentary ...”

“... a tithe of the attention it deserves, it will present the first serious test of the calibre of Tony Blair. In his well-received speech to the last Labour Party Conference, Mr Blair went out of his way to promise the restoration of union rights at GCHQ, and received much praise for his attacks on official secrecy and ...”

“... not just that the Tories have won four General Elections running: they have hardly needed to run. Tony Blair has shown that he is alert to the implication that Labour needs to be imaginative, flexible and responsive if it is to be confident of victory next time. The alternative strategy, of course, seen in the defenders of Clause Four, is to wait with ...”