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“... 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 ...”

“... of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 Teignmouth Road, NW2, built around 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... purposes, under the nominal leadership of a disturbed but malleable liar placed in the White House by the CIA. The European allies were Washington’s puppets – Britain in particular, whose Foreign Secretary spoke and looked ‘like a Martian’. What cut Miletic to the quick was the jejune character of the US. ‘There is nothing in ...”

“... couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the White Cottage carpets reeked of pipe tobacco for twenty years ... he hadn’t that ‘mind’s recoil upon itself’ which makes possible passionate uncertainty, the loss of all gravity which goes with falling in love, the giving-of-oneself, the abandon. He was a ...”

“... American data could not effectively commercialise their technology without American approval. Tony Benn – then minister of technology in Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ administration – both marvelled and chafed at these arrangements. In November 1968, after a meeting with UK Atomic Energy Agency officials, he ...”