“... 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 ...”

“... claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to ...”

“... words to express it, Wilson often needed collaborators to articulate his feelings in song, notably Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks. The alchemy is mysterious: while these may not have been precisely his ‘own’ words, they somehow feel as if they are written in Wilson’s voice. Talking to himself, talking to his wife, talking to God. The more unvarnished the ...”

“... Keep your hair on! in which Jocelyn Stevens, my boss, had invested some money. The sets were by Tony Armstrong-Jones, who was also on the magazine and became a great friend of mine. And I was vaguely given to understand that a good review would be welcome: but I needn’t have worried, because Gallery Nell booed it off the stage. Then I became literary ...”

“... so many of whose front bench were lawyers, consistently attacked solicitors and barristers. Tony Blair (called to the Bar 1976) wanted to ‘derail the gravy train of legal aid’ and Jack Straw (called to the Bar 1972) complained of ‘BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers’. But New Labour’s attack wasn’t on the gravy train: it was on the ...”

“... of privacy in public which includes rather than excludes the acknowledgment of strangers. Tony Harrison’s ‘Changing at York’ takes place in a phone booth in York railway station, where he has gone to inform his son that his train has been delayed. The booth is replete with phobic objects and sensations: a vandalised directory, the smell of ...”

“... celebrated Venter as one of America’s ‘Great Innovators’, they elected to pose him wearing a white lab coat on one side and a businessman’s jacket on the other, an admired chimera of scientific knowledge and capitalist entrepreneurship. Venter grew rich through these manoeuvres. In November 1993, he had over 700,000 shares in HGS, worth $9.2 million ...”

“... saw fighters in military jeeps or off-road motorbikes. As I approached Aalma El Chaeb, columns of white smoke rose from another Israeli strike, and later, in Dhayra, I could hear the woosh-woosh of an outgoing salvo of rockets. At night, my small hotel in Naqoura shook when an Israeli airstrike targeted a nearby position.The inhabitants of Aalma El Chaeb and ...”

“... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...”