“... to see him without a smile. I remembered watching Gordon Brown at a press conference once while Tony Blair was PM, curious about what he would do with his face while Blair was taking questions, and I saw Farage was doing what Brown had: looking away from the other speakers and the audience, not reacting to jokes or ...”

“... take that? And now the process is dead. I can’t see it getting back up again – no one believes Tony Blair anymore in the Unionist community – and I can’t see that anyone in the two Unionist parties could go back into government with Sinn Féin, after the bank robbery and now this McCartney murder. Both Blair and ...”

“... clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher than in the pre-fast-track elections of 2000. Bush and Blair refused to recognise the outcome, but Namibia, Nigeria and the South African observer team, which had monitored the elections, concluded that the result was legitimate. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Africans could do little in the face of mounting ...”

“... several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and their exemplar Tony Blair. They all wanted to convert the populace to an enlightened internationalism, but along the way they forgot to talk us out of nationalism. The military operations that dismantled Yugoslavia and overthrew the undemocratic governments of those ...”

“... remaining notionally in public service throughout, they are worth many millions of dollars. Tony and Cherie Blair were not obscenely wealthy when they arrived in power in 1997. Today they are worth more than $75 million. Consider the working-class voters whom the Clintons or the Blairs exhorted to vote for them in the ...”

“... dangers. If the Eddisbury by-election result is the best the Conservatives can do at midterm, Mr Blair has little to fear. Despite this, however, and despite the fact that he has an overall aim – modernisation – from which he will not deviate, the Prime Minister is said to be ‘frustrated’, as the observer who looks for a coherent programme is likely ...”

“... Even in December 1997, at the supposed nadir of the Windsor clan’s popularity, and the zenith of Tony Blair’s, the Prime Minister’s approval rating in a MORI poll was, at 61 per cent, the same as that for Prince Charles, detested ex-spouse of the Althorp Madonna and prime scapegoat for her death. Even immediately after the Paris shunt, a mere 18 per ...”

“... press conference; at a meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; at the laying to rest of Tony Banks. Some of these entries are inadvertently comical. Writing of Ralph Miliband’s funeral at Golders Green Crematorium in 1994, Benn notes: ‘Anyone on the real left of any significance was there. Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t make it.’ For the most ...”

“... Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual ...”

“... Jocelyn has known or worked with. There is music that has been specially composed, a poem by Tony Harrison, the theme of which is all the toasts he and Jocelyn have drunk together in all the various places where they have worked around the world. They’re due to set off on Monday on another epic journey, the script, based on the Prometheus legend, is ...”

“... policy. His very presence questions the special relationship with the US that under Thatcher and Blair became the equivalent, in the phrase coined by John Lanchester, of the ‘“coital lock” which makes it impossible to separate dogs during sex’. Hence the absurd question relating to nuclear buttons that TV journalists are now putting to Corbyn’s ...”

“... last, of course they want to be rid of the weak and wily Major, of course they would prefer to see Blair as prime minister. But this is the politics of pis aller, the grim strategy of the better ’ole, the weary realism of second-best options. The point hardly needs labouring that the old-time religion of socialism, which was good enough for generations of ...”

“... start doing the rounds on social media. It’s a clip a couple of minutes long from a speech by Tony Benn in the House of 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 ...”

“... it was Dole who proposed a tax cut, risking a deficit increase to stimulate growth. In Europe, Tony Blair is only the most blatant among today’s party leaders of the left in his disdain for poor people and other losers, his overwhelming desire to sup at the table of financial success, and his contempt for the broad mass of working stiffs with small ...”

“... this would not have struck American public opinion as a plausible casus belli. (Did anyone tell Tony Blair about the Syrian objective?) After the toppling of Saddam’s statues in Baghdad in April, however, the Bush Administration turned its attention to perhaps the real objective of the war: Syria. With American forces in Baghdad, Perle continued his ...”