“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”

“... of Dust. He derides innocence as Bowen sighs maternally over it: but in the end poor, idealistic Tony Last’s Gothic castle collapses, teddy-bears and all, just as the heroine’s dream castle collapses in The Death of the Heart. E. Waugh is the satirical obverse of E. Bowen. Let us concentrate for a bit on the novel I have just mentioned: it shows her at ...”

“... resist the temptations of grandiose theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal ...”

“... who said that in the palais ‘you were who you wished to be – warrior, lover, Jimmy Cagney, Tony Curtis, villain, spiv, leader, loner, heavy, Beau Brummell,’ all the while in ‘drapes and rollaway Johnnie Ray collar’. The hall ‘had a particular aroma of velvet and hairspray, Brylcreem and Silvikrin lacquer, cigs, floor polish’; ‘You wore your ...”

“... in Spain at the age of 24 for the metropolis of Rome. After Martial may have been overshadowed by Tony Harrison’s more recent US Martial, but it holds its own vividly, whether presenting an apprentice ‘knobbly, cataracted/with the expression of a frozen cod’, or just swaggering: ‘I’m all right,/I’m a big frog in Bilbilis.’ Porter hadn’t ...”

“... living monument like Brandt. But his oratory has the same blast furnace glow: red-hot rather than white-hot, pouring predictably down the channels of expectation. He is a good man, with quite a bold programme for ‘social justice’. Tax increases for the better-off, a proper minimum wage, dual citizenship for immigrants, less elbowing individualism and more ...”

“... activism. (At the same time, plenty of rave organisers, like Sunrise promoter turned cybercriminal Tony Colston-Hayter, were straight-up capitalists.) When John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1993, ravers were an obvious target. A year later, his government passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police the ...”

“... possesses an archetypal status, and at times an incantatory power. Sasha’s plucking of ‘Tony’ when venting his spleen about the First Interruption has its roots not just in the novel’s concern with the power and danger of coinages, but in Barker’s long-held conviction that a spiritual vision can be achieved through chronicling the sort of ...”

“... Invariably those, like Hailsham, who challenged him head on found themselves worsted. When Tony Benn attempted to affix the ‘Dachau and Belsen’ label to Powell’s speeches on immigration in 1970, Powell snatched the microphone to point out that in 1939 he had sailed all the way from Australia in order to volunteer as a private to fight Hitler. And ...”

“... the Republican right mean there’s now no prospect of the bill being adopted, let alone signed. Tony Blair, in a speech in September, acknowledged that climate change could be ‘so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence’. He identified the rate of change as ‘simply unsustainable in ...”

“... were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two ...”

“... him he gives me joy.’ Balfour murmured that he was profoundly impressed. Compared with all this, Tony Blair’s fear that he might be thought ‘a nutter’ for taking an interest in religion seems rather tame. Yet one wonders how deeply committed to any of it Balfour really was. In his writings he could be eloquent about man’s desolation in an indifferent ...”

“... suggests in Dead Lions (2013) that something ‘seems a bit … unlikely’, Lamb replies: ‘Tony Blair’s a peace envoy. Compared to that, everything’s just business as usual.’ In London Rules (2018), talking to an ex-policeman who now does internal security at the Park (one of the ‘Dogs’), Lamb says: ‘“I quite like cops. You know where you ...”

“... yellow, teal and peach abound in the area. But with its high-ceilinged tenement flats, it attracts white bohemian types too. Morag Ramsay, a French and Spanish teacher, ushered me into her kitchen. There was a poster from a Cuban movie about Che Guevara on her kitchen wall. ‘I bought it on a street in Havana,’ she said. Ramsay, who is 59, had voted SNP all ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”