“... for this sort of snake oil. In his list of thanks to the staff at United he pays tribute to ‘Tony Strudwick and his energetic bunch of sports scientists’ in the same sentence as acknowledging the tireless contribution of ‘our laundry girls’. In many ways this is an anti-Moneyball book. Lewis’s central theme was that managers needed to discount ...”

“... at all: they’re merely playing by the rules that govern behaviour in the Commons. It’s not Tony Blair’s wish to transfer the conventions of the House to the outside world. The rousing climax of his speech on 17 May was: ‘It’s time to reclaim the streets for the decent majority.’ You don’t have to be especially paranoid to worry about the ...”

“... They are the ones who are unelectable.’ A Unite representative who had left Labour during the Blair years and rejoined in the Corbyn era blasted ‘the 172’ – a number destined to go down in infamy – and sneered at the ‘Kinnock dynasty’ and ‘their ilk’ (Neil opposed the Bennites as Labour leader in the 1980s and has supported the moves ...”

“... 29 March. One unforeseen blessing of the war in Iraq is the settlement in Northern Ireland. Blair can hardly claim the credit, as it was only when the focus moved to the Middle East that there was real progress towards agreement in Northern Ireland. The spotlight tempts politicians to perform; shift it and they can just get on with the job. 31 ...”

“... The price of accepting is to swell the payroll vote, and spout stultifying drivel. In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin ...”

“... new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling between Tony Blair’s accession and the 2008 crash. (In Tower Hamlets, prices went up three and a half times.) Even allowing for inflation over that period of time (36 per cent) it’s a terrifying increase.The chart only shows part of Right to Buy’s ...”

“... and it was a short step, via Cherie Booth, from the verdict to a full conspiracy theory involving Tony Blair.) Years ago, in western Kosovo, I stumbled on a lone Albanian family, one of many who’d crept back to the ruins of a village destroyed a few months earlier by Milosevic, and had just been terrorised a second time by Serbian security, in reprisal ...”

“... uranium. Nazarbayev, unsurprisingly, is courted by multinational corporations and Western leaders; Tony Blair fêted him in Downing Street in 2006 and Nicolas Sarkozy visited him with a group of French tycoons in September. Their advisers argue that Nazarbayev is more ‘modern and responsible’ than any other Central Asian leader, and it’s true that ...”

“... laugh, a world citizen at home with ‘my old friend President Shimon Peres’, ‘our old friend Tony Blair’ and a host of other world leaders, but that she’s also a Midwestern Methodist and a dewy-eyed patriot. It puts the final polish on the new Hillary brand that she and her handlers have been fashioning since the debacle of the 2008 ...”

“... the years she had also stayed at the Barclays’ castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten ...”

“... visually: the top half of every page is occupied with Mr C’s ruminations on everything from Tony Blair to Bach, while the bottom half tracks his attempt to get off with a young woman decades younger than himself whose arse excited him when he observed it in the launderette of the building where they both live.)The ethical and, dare one say ...”

“... public schools would be in breach of parents’ ‘human rights’ under the Convention. Perhaps Tony Blair welcomes being constrained in this way, looks forward to being able to blame the Attorney General in the next Labour Government for stopping him from being as radical as his comrades would like him to be. But such issues as property ...”

“... This is not just a good shorthand description of Clinton’s position: it also describes that of Tony Blair and New Labour. It is, in other words, the Third Way, which is the reason the Third Way, despite all the suggestions that the phrase means nothing at all, is an important concept, whose imprecise lineaments are now becoming clear. The Third Way is ...”

“... he was born in 1900, when Victoria was still queen, and he died little more than a month before Tony Blair became prime minister. Pritchett’s family bumped along on that uneasy late Victorian border between the respectable artisans and the aspiring lower middle class. His father, a man with a limitless capacity for financial disaster, belonged to the ...”

“... free. Still, information is power; reputation of power is power. Assange has both. The questions Tony Benn asks of those in power then become pertinent. What power have you got? Where did it come from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? The answer to the last question, at least, is that we ...”