“... Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest work, but just at the point at which he began to win recognition, he appeared to give up writing. Though he continued to publish in little magazines throughout the ...”

“... as much as his bellicose rival Theodore Roosevelt in America’s responsibility to shoulder the white man’s burden. In January 1917 Wilson argued that America should stay out of the war in order, as he said in a cabinet meeting, to ‘keep the white race strong against the yellow – Japan for instance’. He ...”

“... the hydrofoil to Macao in order to see the temples and the villas and the colonial cafés which Tony Watson-Gandy must have seen when he lived there, just after the war, with a Chinese boyfriend and pipes of opium, studying Mandarin. A sudden rush of identification led me, for the length of an afternoon and for the only time in my life, to think boys as ...”

“... 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 the ...”

“... every award in this business, first time out of the box,’ he said, ‘the Grammy, the Emmy, the Tony, the Oscar.’ Tennessee Williams wrote that ‘a giddy God … endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in ...”

“... were never given an address, but their accents suggested London or its suburbs, perhaps close to Tony Hancock’s place in East Cheam, definitely somewhere below the middle of the social scale, a place where couples necked in front parlours and publicans called ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ but not so far down as to be picturesque and identifiable and ...”

“... difference between managing a company that makes marmalade and managing Network Rail.’ He quotes Tony Benn, looking back on the turmoil at BL’s Longbridge plant: ‘And then you bring in managers from a business studies course who’d got a degree in business management but who couldn’t mend a puncture in a motor tyre – and you speak about the people ...”

“... every now and then: the best-known current examples are probably Justin Fashanu of Wimbledon and Tony Cascarino of Millwall. The long ball game has a history. It first appeared in the Fifties when Stan Cullis’s Wolverhampton Wanderers adopted the ideas of a Wing-Commander Charles Reep. Reep had invented a theory called POMO, or Point of Maximum ...”

“... offend, have much straight talking. How do they read now? The reader should probably start with ‘Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock and the Travails of Labour’ (a review of Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left ...”

“... desperately inauthentic sensation. The State of the Union speech. The New Hampshire primary. The White House Easter egg roll. The presentation of the Presidential Thanksgiving turkey (which even comes complete with its own self-satirising pun). I would add the Nobel Prizes though not, oddly enough, the Booker ones. Nothing that has to be done every year ...”

“... deny they do if men carried it behind them and could thump the floor with it. Jacobson cites Tony Hancock (together with Arthur Askey and James Thurber) as his principal literary influence, and one detects the glum eloquence of Anthony Aloysius in passages like the above. It’s probably not coincidental that it was Australia which brought the other ...”

“... of a pretty girl. She might be a Kurd, but maybe not, the report does not say. Then there is a white girl, who could be from anywhere between Moscow and San Francisco; a black boy, probably from Africa, possibly Birmingham; a Malay or Indonesian boy; another boy who I think is South American, but don’t hold me to it, he could be an Arab; and a girl I can ...”

“... of Z Cars, found allies in the Wednesday Play’s script editor and producer, Roger Smith and Tony Garnett. ‘What we realised,’ Loach said, ‘was that social democrats and Labour politicians were simply acting on behalf of the ruling class, protecting the interests of capital.’ No sooner had he identified a politically receptive audience than he ...”

“... and the war in Kosovo that were manifestly being driven principally from 10 Downing Street and the White House. He also had to sit tight and accept a great many heavy-handed attempts to impose the will of Number 10 on local Labour organisations – the Welsh Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John ...”

“... 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 which ...”