“... away and beneath his eyes there was no skin either.’ The post-mortem identified 93 injuries. Blair probably lied to Parliament in denying any earlier knowledge of the Abu Ghraib abuses when the scandal broke in May 2004, since the Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell had been briefed by the Red Cross about them in March; on his return to London, as the ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... at the selection meeting was a bit underwhelming – one supporter says ‘he didn’t really have Blair’s panache’ – but it didn’t matter. He won. Ten years later, he’s prime minister.By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and ...”

“... way the Scotland of the early 18th century had to go to be a modern state. And the archives of Blair Atholl illustrate the diversities of allegiance within a dominant family strategically placed between Highland and Lowland society, anxious to assuage social and national prejudices and yet to get the best out of the English connection. Mr Lenman’s ...”

“... as Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath, outside the City limits. The grant had been withdrawn by the Blair administration, which figured that the Corporation had more than enough cash at its disposal to keep giving back to the community even without the offset – what with the £100 million it receives annually from the government anyway, plus its enormous ...”

“... Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. It has all too often served as a cheerleader for the Bush and Blair governments and failed to take up important subjects when it ought to have done. There is one major exception to this generalisation. We know many details about the business of ‘extraordinary rendition’ thanks to the work of journalists writing for ...”

“... Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work ...”

“... when they developed and patented steam looms for carpet-weaving: ‘Let each carpet produced by John Crossley be its own traveller,’ the slogan went. The Crossley family bought the house from Samuel Morton Peto, who built the Houses of Parliament and Nelson’s Column before going bankrupt from his investments in the railways: he had to give up the house ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... south; Poland and Finland further east; the Adriatic is a stone’s throw away. Perhaps, Tony Blair calls it a ‘doorstep’ because Albanians are predominantly Muslim. The Government repeatedly refers to Serb atrocities which, George Robertson teaches us, Europe has not seen the like of ‘since the Middle Ages’. Isuppose if you overlook the period ...”

“... to the Hutton Inquiry concerning Andrew Gilligan’s reporting on the Today programme of the Blair government’s ‘sexed-up’ Iraq dossier.The phrase is useful because it expresses something of the BBC’s relationship – in the minds of its senior staff at least – to the nation. It is portable between controversies. It underlines the ...”

“... in the context of post-Cold War ‘operations of Anglo-Saxon reconquest’. He faults Kouchner and John Garang, the leader of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, for undermining a joint Franco-Sudanese strategy to counter ‘Anglo-Saxon expansionism in the region’ in the early 1990s. He sees a ‘total convergence of Kouchner’s actions in ...”

“... propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law’ (which you might think applies to, say, the Blair government’s case for war in 2002-3), along with ‘any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’. The tension between the two articles exposes the oddity of the liberal ...”

“... there is one remarkable case in which the judge sets out in detail the then prime minister Tony Blair’s privately expressed exasperation at the UK’s inability to ship a suspect back to Egypt to be interrogated by the security apparatus of one of his holiday friends, Hosni Mubarak. This simple guarantee against serious ill-treatment has not inhibited the ...”

“... period when the idea of central bank independence took root, but it couldn’t be acted on until Blair took office. From 1997, the Bank of England was given the operational freedom to craft monetary policy in line with the inflation target set by the Treasury. It lost its role in banking supervision and managing government debt, but under the governorship of ...”