“... not much,’ Julian said. ‘Ingratitude.’ ‘Well,’ Julian said, ‘if Tony Blair – a war criminal – can get £120,000, I should get at least £1 more than him.’ ‘You want me to write back to them and say you want more money?’ ‘Yes,’ said Julian. Later, Julian was on the phone trying to instruct Alan Dershowitz ...”

“... way to Labour’s ‘Scottish Raj’, as Jeremy Paxman put it in March 2005. Paxman’s target was Tony Blair’s ‘attack dog’ John Reid, a Glaswegian former Communist who, having enjoyed the hospitality of Radovan Karadzic in 1993, now concentrates on bullying civil servants in the Home Office. The Scottish Raj has included ...”

“... failed to be elected president. The most important figure in his Oxford years was the dashing Tony Crosland, two years older, with whom he had a passionate relationship for a while, and with whom he maintained a close and at times rivalrous friendship until the latter’s early death in 1977. Crosland was the more obviously brilliant of the two, with more ...”

“... all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the styles was being refought, sort of. The protagonists were united in one bias: they loathed everything ...”

“... of any kind, moral anarchy takes over and the rule of the self prevails.’ This, perhaps, is Tony Blair’s form of Anglo-Catholicism, in which right conduct becomes, in Arnold’s phrase, three-quarters of religion. Blair has said that he had some respect for John Major’s Back to Basics campaign. But the actual ...”

“... are the last people to believe those myths. In Scarface, Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer) tells Tony Montana (Al Pacino) not to get high on his own supply. Cataclysms like Brexit, and politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are what happens when an entire country gets high on its own supply, but everyone else stopped buying long ago. I was in ...”

“... Saif al-Islam emerged within the regime. It was the fashion some years ago in circles close to the Blair government – in the media, principally, and among academics – to talk up Saif al-Islam’s commitment to reform and it is the fashion now to heap opprobrium on him as his awful father’s son. Neither judgment is accurate, both are self-serving. Saif ...”

“... and the idea of the fire brigade as a last line of defence. But that began to change during the Blair era and there has been a flurry of reductions in the fire service. ‘Knightsbridge Fire Station has closed,’ Matt Wrack told me. ‘Kensington Fire Station has lost a fire engine. Half the fire cover within four miles of Grenfell Tower has gone in the ...”