“... tried to continue some form of modern classicism – David Wild, John Winter, David Chipperfield, Tony Fretton, Georgie Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found designing mews houses and studios in Camden, Hampstead and Islington, all of course ...”

“... wanted. He called for a ‘general amnesty’ of previously banned accounts, including those of white supremacists. Advertisers were spooked: they didn’t want their brands to appear next to violent pornography or anything too obviously racist. In Musk’s first month, ad sales fell 80 per cent. Musk blamed ‘activist groups’ for turning advertisers ...”

“... intelligence-gathering operations taking place in this country today. This is the reality behind Tony Blair’s evangelical declaration that ‘we . . . here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.’ Shoulder to shoulder is not the ...”

“... I doubt if she’ll be pleased.Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty alcoholic; his mother, a dim-witted teenage bride, didn’t want him and late in her ...”

“... in 2003, responsibility for the disastrous decision to send the army to Helmand in 2006 belongs to Tony Blair. And yet it takes two to indulge in unnecessary wars: the leader to tell the military what to do, and the military to tell the leader that it can be done. Ledwidge quotes Matt Cavanagh, who worked in Downing Street on the Helmand plan, as saying that ...”

“... of a flight to Bahrain, to ‘prove the route’ for British Airways, his phone rang. It was Tony Benn, Secretary of State for Industry. Mr Trubshaw, Benn said, I understand you’re off to Bahrain next week; is there a chance you could organise a flight for me and some of the chaps before you go? Certainly Minister, Trubshaw replied. No problem at ...”

“... public schools would be in breach of parents’ ‘human rights’ under the Convention. Perhaps Tony Blair welcomes being constrained in this way, looks forward to being able to blame the Attorney General in the next Labour Government for stopping him from being as radical as his comrades would like him to be. But such issues as property ...”

“... in each of the figures in Buddenbrooks, especially in Thomas but also in Christian and also in Tony, and in all the figures more or less.’ He just could not stop. ‘Nothing mattered more to Thomas Mann than to win the world’s respect,’ Hayman writes, but in the mornings all Mann’s life, alone with whatever version of the self, or of his family, he ...”

“... Just before the title of the film flashes across the screen, the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as ...”

“... with Labour about to return to power, but still anxious to establish its mainstream credentials, Tony Blair chose to highlight his acceptance of the anti-union consensus in an article for the Times: ‘Let me state the position clearly, so that no one is in any doubt. [Under Labour] the essential elements of the trade union legislation of the 1980s will ...”

“... uranium. Nazarbayev, unsurprisingly, is courted by multinational corporations and Western leaders; Tony Blair fêted him in Downing Street in 2006 and Nicolas Sarkozy visited him with a group of French tycoons in September. Their advisers argue that Nazarbayev is more ‘modern and responsible’ than any other Central Asian leader, and it’s true that he ...”

“... up from tearing strips off the now dead bird. Eventually R. opens the back door and the hawk, a white flash on its breast, flies off with (R. thinks) a blackbird in pursuit. All that it leaves on the grass is a smear and some feathers, everything else – beak, claws, legs – has been eaten. It’s something neither of us has ever seen before and leaves us ...”

“... visually: the top half of every page is occupied with Mr C’s ruminations on everything from Tony Blair to Bach, while the bottom half tracks his attempt to get off with a young woman decades younger than himself whose arse excited him when he observed it in the launderette of the building where they both live.)The ethical and, dare one say ...”

“... the years she had also stayed at the Barclays’ castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes ...”

“... regulation, still attached to Birmingham and Cambridge Universities. Gently sunburned, with white hair and beard, he’s almost seventy; he has a Puckish energy, an enthusiasm more postgraduate than professorial, and a way of punctuating his conversation with a falsetto giggle. He once said that instead of RIP, the inscription on his gravestone should ...”