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“... for Tony Harrison Happiness, therefore, must be some form of theoria. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X.8 Theoria: ... a looking at, viewing, beholding ... ‘to go abroad to see the world’ (Herodotus) ... 2. of the mind, contemplation, speculation, philosophic reasoning ... theory ... II. the being a spectator at the theatre or the games ...”

“... is abducted and brought to Russia to serve as deputy to the leader, Son of Bread, who sits at a white grand piano. The Chinese peasant, Ch’an, turns out to be a genuine populist: What Ch’an liked most of all was not the food and drink, not all his mansions and mistresses, but the local people, the workers. They were hard-working and ...”

“... When Ali brought out his Koran I thought of Tony Blair. It was February 2002. The Taliban had retreated, having burned Ali’s village to the ground. Four feet of snow had closed the passes into Bamiyan and all the roads were laid with anti-vehicle mines. Ali opened the carved wooden box, kissed the bundle, unwrapped it carefully, said a prayer and opened the book ...”

“... 2001, Robert Pickett fired several rounds from a handgun through the fence surrounding the White House.Unaware of whether or not a terrorist incident was playing out, secret service agents rushed to the sides of the vice-president and president. They found Cheney working on a speech in his office in the West Wing, surrounded by ringing phones, a ...”

“... the job as leader of the Labour Party and already he wasn’t doing it right. What colour poppy, white or red, would he wear to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day? Would he kneel to the queen when he was admitted to the Privy Council (see Martin Loughlin’s piece on p. 29)? On the day after he was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his ...”

“... ankles, fill her bosom with milk. Until, that is, ‘one of those men’, a militia fighter named Tony, appears below the balcony, ‘smiling at my sister, stepping on the gas to make his sports car roar and fume’. He pays for her groceries, calls her Madame, whispers into her ear. And soon enough they elope. Under threat of ...”

“... in Manhattan and was given a questionnaire: did she know anyone called ‘Big Paul’ or ‘Tony Ducks’ or ‘Fat Ralphie’? Had she ever seen The Godfather, or read the book? She remembers being asked ‘twenty different ways if I was Italian’. Also: would looking at photographs of mutilated corpses so upset her that she’d have trouble following ...”

“... Now that Tony Blair has almost stopped hanging around the office poisoning the chalice for his inevitable successor, the season for political obituaries is wide open. Not that it hadn’t already started, with a raft of more and less uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry ...”

“... the sky in Bulatov’s large canvases (‘Glory to the CPSU!’), or the rows upon rows of white rectangles that comprise Komar and Melamid’s ‘Quotation’, where we don’t even need to see the words to recognise a deadened formula. Sorokin’s early texts were displayed at Conceptualist exhibitions and circulated among friends in the form of ...”

“... Rolling Home for Tony, former student In that shop the things stuck out their mitts wanting to strike bargains, get on with the job. Hammers, brace-and-bits, hearty saws, planes that I’m cackhanded with, chisels with more edge than I can trust, that scoff at fumbling, my kind of muscle. ‘Get yourself a big one, dad!’ Your joke was good, went home: I could have had a son your age, been less tentative with things, had muscle in good stead ...”

“... Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ecstatically how ‘legend after ...”

“... irritating manner, spoiling the atmosphere of a pub which Croucher favours. This bounder is called Tony (Croucher’s least favourite name) and kisses a British girl ‘full on the lips’. This is ‘not the English way. To see such a respectable-seeming and well-brought-up girl embracing a foreigner, one of a nation that has contributed so signally to our ...”

“... One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a Northern (or Midlands in my case) English worry about what happens to us socially when we drop our ‘h’s and pronounce our ‘u’s as in ‘wuss’ rather than as in (the Southern form of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War ...”

“... which I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting of the parliamentary party. The chairman, Tony Lloyd, opened with a little pep talk, remarking that there was ‘a duty on us collectively not to give into despair’. (Yes, that’s how bad it is.) Then Gordon, eyes half-closed with fatigue, spoke. This was Gordon like I’ve never seen him before. He ...”

“... Highland charge. He boasted that ‘fire by ranks’ would deal with it, and told his friends at White’s Club that he would sweep the rebels out of Britain with two regiments of dragoons. But outside Falkirk, his guns sank axle-deep into the mud as he tried to occupy a high moorland position he had never seen or reconnoitred, while ‘a ferocious ...”