“... faith and would live another 25 years. Betjeman sits most comfortably alongside the Goons or Tony Hancock, quirky depressives of the wireless age whose voices speak to a disenchanted, disconnected world, laughing it all off until the red light in the studio goes out. Betjeman, his name apart, was utterly, balefully English in everything except his hatred ...”

“... him write them. I looked at filmed interviews, including I forget how many hours of out-takes from Tony Palmer’s film Aspects of Stravinsky. I soon realised that, in order to weigh up what I was hearing, I needed to know something about the speakers’ relationships with the composer and those around him, which was precisely what I was trying to find out by ...”

“... Thatcherism continues to cast its long shadow over British politics. At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady ...”

“... and safer, especially for America and Israel’. He is given a shrunken skull and ‘exceptionally white teeth’; Franzen goes to some lengths to deny him a name: it is clear we are approaching the heart of darkness. It’s worth quoting his exchange with Joey across a packed dinner table: ‘We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some ...”

“... family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas all rolled into one. He was stout and beaming with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. He wore a black jacket and a waistcoat, and striped trousers like a faithful old family retainer, or Lord Reith. Ronnie knew how to fix anything – tickets for the Cup Final, a box at ...”

“... was only the opening shot, and whether he runs again or does or does not eventually win the White House, he has unleashed a force in American politics that cannot be bridled.’ Buchanan’s significance, Francis concluded, was cultural as much as political, the beginning of a quasi-Gramscian ‘long march’ to restore American identity. In ...”

“... creatively accounted.) I slightly got to know Gingrich’s press spokesman, a raffish Brit named Tony Blankley who chain-smoked in defiance of all regulations, kept a good table and had given up a promising career as a child-actor when he got too chubby. (‘My last movie was also Humphrey Bogart’s last movie.’) Just before the 1992 Presidential ...”

“... an Iraqi woman living in Kuwait I met when I was here a few weeks ago. She thinks I look like Tony Blair, which I do not, but she thinks it anyway. I drive to her flat, navigating by map and mobile. She is wearing a white tracksuit. She has painted the walls of her flat an apricot colour. She leaves the door open. We ...”

“... the assumption that full participation in society required acceptance of the norms set by straight white males. Yet even as the public sphere grew more inclusive, the boundaries of permissible debate were narrowing. Critiques of concentrated power, imperial or plutocratic, became less common. Indeed, the preoccupation with racial and gender identity has ...”

“... seems in Mullin’s case to display a characteristic roulade of humility and hubris. To go with ‘Tony’ would no doubt come across as faux intimate, but on the other hand, referring to the prime minister as ‘Blair’, or indeed ‘the prime minister’, wouldn’t have differentiated Mullin from the common run of people, for whom the PM was just a bloke ...”

“... editors, ‘I wish to point out to you, an editor of the New Yorker,’ he writes to Katharine White, ‘that Mr West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful … Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.’ Two weeks later, he is putting on his best shirt for Lionel Trilling. ‘The many ...”

“... in Helen’s story that have inspired numerous recent dealings with the matter of Troy, as in Tony Harrison’s Hecuba, when the chorus curses: I pray as a small revenge For all our dead and for Troy’s burning Helen ends up as a refugee. Ever since Mephistopheles summoned a devil to delude Faust into believing that Helen of Troy stood before him and ...”

“... was merely overweight). Among the colour shots of charred bodies in Odessa there were black and white photos of naked, murdered and wounded women and children, slaughtered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 in Volhyn, as if the massacre constituted an eternal judgment on the Ukrainian character. From Volhyn to Odessa. The term ...”

“... to celebrate its positive ideals. Her three great heroes, Alexandra Bergson of O Pioneers!, ‘Tony’ Shimerda of My Ántonia and Bishop Latour of Death Comes for the Archbishop, are practical-minded immigrants who survive in Nebraska and New Mexico because they see their very European sense of legend and personal nobility reflected in the potential of ...”

“... visions he entertained. The fiasco over the proposed reforms to trade union law in the 1969 White Paper In Place of Strife may have been the low point of Wilson’s premiership. The TUC eventually gave its ‘solemn and binding’ undertaking to moderate wage demands if the legislation was abandoned. The Economist called the arrangement ‘In Place of ...”