“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”

“... The Sweet Smell of Success. I love Malkovich in Les Liaisons dangereuses. I love Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich; I love Adaptation. Brilliant idea! We could write a book about this! We could write a book about writing a book about this! Bad idea …’ In a way, Your Name Here is simply a scrapbook, attesting to an odd, tense friendship, told through ...”

“... a joke. ‘That might have been true of the previous government,’ said one such official. ‘Blair and Cook have made clear that they have no interest whatever in things going wrong. The last thing the UK Union Presidency wants nextyear is to have the Italians really upset that they’ve been excluded. Nor do we want some kind of chaotic ...”

“... all of these victims were women, children, the elderly, sick or mentally ill, but according to John Laughland in the Spectator, their deaths do not count because most of them are ‘buried in individual not mass graves’. Yet it seems clear to most of us working here that a great deal of violence was inflicted on people in quite small groups. Unprotected ...”

“... led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”

“... like New Labour, and we all know how to rise above that. We were delighted of course when Blair won the election a year ago: not because we had an intelligent radical reforming government at last, but because it offered us infinite opportunities for parading our leftier-than-thou disappointments. Every glance at the present releases a warm gush of ...”

“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”