“... 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 ...”

“... and appreciation of modern writers in that language as well as in the Classical tongues. Hugh Blair, a Church of Scotland minister who from 1762 became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, was in effect the world’s first Professor of English Literature. He built his lectures on Smith’s work. Smith held that ‘we in this ...”

“... without being beholden to it. From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken. Some picking and ...”

“... of which, Sequence, he co-founded with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. Along with Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz aimed to bring a version of auteurism to British film, and they did as much with the documentary movement Free Cinema. In 1959, Reisz directed We Are the Lambeth Boys, and he made his first feature film a year later, Saturday Night and ...”

“... expensive ways for Labour not to think about this reality. The elections also provoked another of Tony Blair’s near-weekly ‘rare interventions’ in British politics, with a smattering of TV interviews based on an essay in the New Statesman. Blair’s retainers dutifully lauded the essay: David Miliband, the king ...”

“... belong to a tradition that stretches back to Labour’s beginnings (this could never be said of Tony Blair’s). Those who adopt this view would do better just to come out with what they actually mean, which is that it was only in the 1990s, under Blair, that the Labour Party finally found its perfect form. But it ...”

“... competition and the bottom line? In fact, as Leys and Player show, it was the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that began replacing the public components of the NHS with private ones, the effect concealed by large spending increases, long before Lansley and Cameron took charge. If the Conservatives and their Liberal allies are dismantling ...”

“... the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker rocking-chair in the shade of the willow by the pool. Except that I’m slightly pestered by insects it’s an ideal situation, with the ...”

“... modernising despots, insisted as late as 2008.Inspired by Thatcher and right-wing US think tanks, Tony Blair pushed state policy and public attitudes in Britain closer to the notion that welfare is a problem rather than the solution. Over the last decade, successive Conservative governments have ruthlessly shredded what was left of the social safety net ...”

“... up and down as the heavyweight arm-twisting pays off, the celebrity assaults, camera-kissing by Blair and Beckham: we get the Games on 6 July 2005. Then the shock of a traumatised London the following morning, death toll rising, dazed survivors captured on mobile phones as they stumble through smoke-filled, soft-focus tunnels. Bomb carriers looped on ...”

“... a veteran of the 1974 debacle, performed a series of craven contortions as he compliantly followed Tony Blair’s mazy hesitations on devolution. Blair was an instinctive centraliser and control freak, who breezily likened the projected Scottish Parliament to an English parish council, yet in his early years as party ...”

“... Service it’s a more useful investment of public money than any number of state visits, or, in Blair’s case, holidays with Berlusconi (who, incidentally, I never hear mentioned throughout). 29 January, Rome. Seduced by its name, first thing this morning we go to look at Nero’s Golden House, or such parts of it as have been excavated. It’s a ...”

“... described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship girl’. He summed it up by saying: ‘I always liked her, but she always bored me a bit.’ Being boring is a sin for an intellectual. But it is not ...”

“... to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of Tony Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking ...”