“... 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 ...”

“... consequently, Labour should show ‘humility’ and return to Blairism under a different leader. John Rentoul recently wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that ...”

“... in Fallujah are becoming more confident. In one attack in February they almost killed General John Abizaid, the US Middle East commander, and in another they overran the police headquarters, killing some twenty men. The soldiers in the specialised units of the 82nd Airborne Division sound a little perplexed by the sort of war they are fighting. At a base ...”

“... 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 the ...”

“... 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 an ...”

“... Commons in 1998, back in the distant days of New Labour, of which he was a frequent critic. Tony Blair’s government was seeking parliamentary approval to ‘use all necessary means’ against Iraq, which for years had been accused by Britain and its allies of developing weapons of mass destruction. Benn did not believe the situation justified a military ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical generalisation, omitting the John Sutherland who composed the polemic ‘Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology’ in favor of the John Sutherland who compiled ‘The Victorian Novelists: Who Were They?’ – a question he answers ...”

“... monarchism is in tension with some proto-republican elements. Paulin’s next major monarchist, John Dryden, seems a less ambiguous figure: ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, which Paulin much admires and prints in full, presents the political debate stirred up by the Whigs as a feverish disease of which the body politic needs to be cured. This nostalgia for an ...”

“... In January the government had been defeated on a parliamentary motion submitted by the Radical MP John Roebuck which called for an inquiry into the conduct or misconduct of the war. Aberdeen resigned and, to Queen Victoria’s understandable distaste, was replaced by Palmerston. A traditional view of him as sabre-rattling ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... way of painting him as dangerous. But this has always been something of a red herring. Unlike John McDonnell (who cut his teeth as chair of finance at the radical GLC in the early 1980s), he has shown little interest in economic policy during his career, dedicating far more energy to opposing imperialism abroad than economics at home. In any case, recent ...”