“... of character have been influenced by Lady Falkender’s guide and mentor. In seeking to assess Tony Benn’s potential as a future Labour prime minister, she writes that his fantasy concerns the rule of the ordinary man but an ordinary man transformed into a superhuman of sparkling intelligence, total integrity and overflowing love and kindness. How that ...”

“... the rightness of what you are saying or selling. Mr Wainwright is correct; it does resemble one of Tony Blair’s techniques: the Prime Minister’s wide-eyed defence of his Party in the Ecclestone business, for instance. By interposing his own reassuring image between the band and the public, Branson was able to take on the Sex Pistols (after they had been ...”

“... object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no particular ...”

“... the UK was as usual being criticised for being soft on terror. It had suspended some aid, and Tony Blair wrote to the president expressing anxiety that the government was escalating hostilities in an unwinnable war and failing to protect human rights. (I hope he had to wrestle with the irony for at least a second or two before he signed this letter.) The ...”

“... adviser David Young as minister without portfolio in 1984, but the Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made much more use of the practice of outside appointments, with Brown appointing Peter Mandelson in 2008 as secretary of state for business and then in 2009 as ‘first secretary of state’, a title that was chosen instead of deputy ...”

“... unable to spot the cop in their midst. True Romance, Tarantino’s first script, directed by Tony Scott and released in 1993, has a big drug deal that ends in a massacre because too many people show up at the party. There is a marvellous three-way stand-off here – drug-buyer’s bodyguards against cops against Mafia – which is repeated in Reservoir ...”

“... chiefly in the cause of social control and illegal violence. In effecting this rupture of morale, Tony Blair had an importance second only to Cheney. After 2001, Blair’s words carried a weight with respectable opinion in the US unrivalled by any American politician. His demeanour lent to the campaign for war a presumption of humility that Cheney could never ...”

“... which classical motifs – a cherub here, a maiden there – are delicately picked out in crisp white relief. Jasper was an unglazed white stoneware that could be stained with mineral oxides, producing its distinctive colours: alongside various shades of blue, there was sage green, lilac and chocolate brown, all as ...”

“... Punk rockers looked ugly, partly because, being ill-favoured, gangly and for the most part poor-white geeks, they were to the manner born, and partly because they wanted to. They sounded ugly, partly because not many could play their instruments very well, partly because they were out of their heads most of the time, but mostly because they wanted to. The ...”

“... indefatigable zeal.’ A century later, little has changed. ‘They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South,’ one former ExxonMobil board member told Coll. ‘They shared a belief in the One Right Answer, that you would solve the equation and that would be the answer, and it didn’t need to be debated.’ The attitude gained them ...”

“... movement visualised its anger, the demands and the diversity of its members. The purple, green and white of the suffragette colours formed a new revolutionary tricolour, and the WSPU and the suffragettes, the union’s militant element, patterned themselves on the radical Enlightenment. Led by the artist Jacques-Louis David, the Jacobins adapted Catholic ...”

“... War”’.Kowol takes issue with that claim. He begins not with a politician but with John Baker White, a reserve officer in the London Rifle Brigade before the war and then a serving officer. Baker White kept a journal, a curious but fascinating document which was published in 1942 as A Soldier Dares to Think. He was ...”

“... a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. If the trout is a poem, the wand is knowledge of the land and people: it’s beautiful and apparently artlessly simple, but ...”

“... whoop down the avenue. The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the ...”

“... to their conclusion. But really after the 1969 Hyde Park Free Concert (Mick’s rather desirable white frock and all those hypocritical butterflies for the newly dead unlamented Brian), Richards’s reiterative narrative of Stones songs, gigs and internal warfare in Life was all news to me, and not all of it riveting. I see that this makes me an unlikely ...”