“... the direction of The Temptress: he was taking too long over it and he had ordered the leading man, Tony Moreno, Hollywood’s top post-Valentino Latin lover, to shave off his signature moustache. The Temptress made a loss, but everyone now knew just how hot Garbo was. Louise Brooks said that MGM had at last found itself a heroine ‘with youth, beauty and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... further 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rate. The Bill’s celebration of victimhood astutely catches the mood of the tabloid press: Tony Blair has even suggested that the criminal justice system should be renamed the victim justice system – an idea which threatens to turn criminal justice into a primitive system of personal retribution. To think of the Bill as a victim’s charter is to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... George Robertson and others – the highest ever proportion of Scots in a Labour cabinet. Even Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh. In his quest to scrap Labour’s Clause IV commitment to common ownership, Blair was encouraged by a victory at Scottish Labour’s 1995 conference, recalling in his memoirs that if they could win in Scotland ‘where traditional ...”

“... world of liberated young women and discreet gifts of ‘kif’. Elsewhere, he plays the Grumpy Old White Guy to perfection – especially on American university campuses, where he finds disturbing premonitory signs of dumbing down, special pleading, levelling out.Gore Vidal, who knew both politics and Burgess, said of him that ‘to the extent [he] has any ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shoes, and a priest’s plain black stock, the whole funereal costume relieved only by the stiff white circle of his religious collar, glowing round his neck like a fallen halo. He also had black spectacles with very thick lenses, of the kind that seem not an enablement of sight but an impediment to it, and a black pipe which he coddled with long palavers of ...”

“... the same era. In its prime, between 7800 and 10,000 people lived here, in 2758 flats and houses. Tony Blair came to the Aylesbury in 1997, shortly after he won power. In his speech, he addressed ‘what we all know exists: an underclass, if you like, of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose. Just as there are no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”