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“... for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of soft-core irony and hard-core sentiment. But apart from reassurance and a sort of avenging pride, what are these magazines selling to their readers? With their grisly combinations of sensitivity and debasement ...”

“... working for the BBC who couldn’t be public, but we can name them now – Ken Trodd, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, John McGrath. You know, from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out ...”

“... and become more like the electoral machines of their leaders, as is largely the case in America. Tony Blair’s celebrated ‘project’, guided by Philip Gould, dismantled the rambling institutions that formed the Labour coalition and turned Labour into whatever the leader wanted it to be, even, in Blair’s case, a ...”

“... been shaped by three factors: the big budget increases it received under the Labour government of Tony Blair in the early 2000s, rescuing the service from 18 years of Conservative neglect and, at the cost of some ruinous public-private mortgages, covering the land with shiny new hospitals; the steady increase in the role of profit-making firms as NHS ...”

“... country, and another set of bankers moves in. Not all City types are vile, obviously. My friend Tony isn’t vile. We have many interests in common and chat easily about all sorts of things. But I’m sometimes made aware of a significant gap between us. It’s a philosophical and practical gap, and it is to do with money. ...”

“... to a halt in a fraction of a second was subjected to market shocks that had no market solution. Blair’s government had already intervened to slow down the switch from coal to gas; in 2002 it had little choice but to bail out British Energy, the private company that owned the nuclear stations. And there was a deeper, less visible problem. Neta was ...”

“... Clarke (King’s, plus a brief period at the Brookings Institution in Washington), claimed that Blair had been ‘guilty of confused optimism’.After Iraq, a number of senior figures in the British military had misgivings about intervening in Libya in 2011 but the defence intelligentsia didn’t share their concerns. RUSI’s major report on Libya, which ...”

“... in Europe is a frustrating business. In Britain Liberal Democrats can only stand by and fume while Blair’s Third Way steals liberal nostrums and enlists them in the service of a new centrist consensus designed to keep Lib Dems on the margins for ever. In Germany, the liberals have gone from being the king-makers of the Kohl era to bystanders in ...”

“... close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed Rupert Murdoch’s solid support, that was enough to set News International on Watson’s scent. A campaign of personal vilification ...”

“... May 2nd is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s 1997 election victory and the day in 1982 on which a British navy submarine torpedoed the General Belgrano. Soon after colleagues at Camp Abu Naji woke up to news of Anthony Wakefield’s death, Lynndie England would appear in a Texas court to ...”

“... towards radical conservatism, Carlylism can also be discerned at work beneath the surface of Tony Blair’s Christian Socialism, a line which descends via F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Blair contrives to put an upbeat spin on his ‘muscular Christianity’ (‘tough’ is his favoured term) but the essence ...”

“... public sector outsourcing, whose shtick rests on the idea that government is crap at doing stuff. Tony Blair’s obsession with ‘public service modernisation’, built on the creed that ‘what matters is what works,’ provided an adjacent justification for outsourcing and endless managerial reforms: they would, it was said, inject more ...”

“... a catchphrase for the Nineties: almost as soon as the words ‘stakeholding society’ were out of Tony Blair’s mouth, they were being dismissed as just another piece of vapid electioneering. But ‘stakeholding’ is a perfectly respectable idea. If Blair thinks it is going to win him any votes he is almost certainly ...”

“... ended with the FA managing yet again to stave off the statutory regulation it so badly needs. How Blair could entrust such a task to Chris Smith and Tony Banks beggars belief: Kate Hoey, a far superior politician, merely got sacked for her pains, much to the delight of the FA. When Ken Richardson, the owner of Doncaster ...”

“... to foist gay priests on them. In fact, a Sri Lankan journalist wrote in 1999, reacting against Tony Blair’s pontificating, ‘like everything else, human rights . . . are not absolute and are relative. They are relative to the culture. The present-day human rights are relative to the present West, which has been successful in establishing their ...”