“... political anagrams cited by Fowler are great: Shirley Williams is ‘I aimlessly whirl’, while Tony Blair MP decodes as ‘I’m Tory plan B’. There are more recent possibilities he doesn’t explore: Nicholas Clegg’s name suggests he could shift up a gear (‘I’ll change cogs’) or just slow things down (‘chain clogs leg’). Samantha Cameron ...”

“... swimming, brass-rubbing in local churches. And school food, also. There is a wonderful moment in Tony Palmer’s film about Britten, A Time There Was, when the composer’s housekeeper, Miss Hudson, explains in her beautiful East Anglian accent, what kind of food he and Pears liked:They were home-cookin’ lovers, but Mr Pears come home from abroad and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is it time to start a family of new rights, and possibly of duties, to go with them? What the 1997 white paper did not anticipate was the context in which the present discussion would take place. Instead of a comfortable bedding down in our domestic law of the culture of elementary rights to which we and the rest of Europe signed up in the aftermath of World ...”

“... At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended by Tony Blair, Jack Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society ...”

“... testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his son-in-law Hussein Kamel in ...”

“... and misery’ – while reaping its benefits, uncovering a road that led from Thomas Paine to Tony Blair. Settling his account with Marxism required a reckoning with Marx himself. As early as 1979, when Stedman Jones still identified as a socialist, he was exhorting his comrades to ‘de-theologise Marx’. Marxists had produced brilliant readings of the ...”

“... whether the policies of the US and other Nato powers contributed to the outbreak of the war. Tony Wood’s chapter in Natopolitanism argues that ‘the US and its Nato allies necessarily played a role in shaping the context for the invasion.’ Outrage at Russia’s actions and solidarity with Ukrainians are wholly justified – but they ‘should not be ...”

“... new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling between Tony Blair’s accession and the 2008 crash. (In Tower Hamlets, prices went up three and a half times.) Even allowing for inflation over that period of time (36 per cent) it’s a terrifying increase.The chart only shows part of Right to Buy’s drawbacks. Those ...”

“... Gore had already gone further than Congress would accept – at a time when a second Bush in the White House was still barely imaginable. What concentrated minds at Kyoto was a single sentence in the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report of 1995: ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.’ Pooh-poohing the IPCC’s ...”

“... more or less, by then situated in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like ...”

“... take a case to appeal, there are other new difficulties. Barbara (not her real name) worked on a white farm in Zimbabwe and was smuggled to the UK by an associate of her employer in 2001 after she was assaulted and her life threatened by Zanu PF supporters. Telling the Home Office interviewers what had been done to her was difficult: ‘I didn’t want to ...”

“... the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am no longer sure what ...”

“... take that? And now the process is dead. I can’t see it getting back up again – no one believes Tony Blair anymore in the Unionist community – and I can’t see that anyone in the two Unionist parties could go back into government with Sinn Féin, after the bank robbery and now this McCartney murder. Both Blair and Ahern have been left with severe egg on ...”

“... craft. That may ultimately be what differentiates him from more than capable contemporaries like Tony Bennett and Mel Tormé: with Sinatra there’s less obvious technique on show and more personality. Except, what is most characteristic about that personality is how unshowy it is: how it often feels deeply submerged, and hard to touch. He can sound on the ...”