“... not Hans Blix and Co.) to unearth the weapons once assumed to be posing an imminent – and Blair’s minatory ‘45 minutes’ sets new standards in imminence – threat to countries such as our own which their owners had no means of reaching. What has tended to go unsaid is that if these weapons did exist, they posed, most obviously, a threat ...”

“... of the Government majority in the House of Commons, to decide the question of whether Blair & Co. or the BBC were to be blamed for exaggerating certain details in the Intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons, was quite wrong. How wrong became doubly apparent when, following all too immediately on Dr Kelly’s death, our footloose Prime Minister ...”

“... which seems likely to win it. And we must accept the fact that it really is new. When Tony Blair assures us of that he is not, as the Tories insist, merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the ...”

“... in the face of the most extravagant and impertinent opposition from US power monopolies, of the Blair Government’s attempts to encourage the coal industry by curbing the growth of gas, proof of the second. Yet for some reason, thanks at least in part to the abject performances of the Conservative Party, the Government did survive. One of the few political ...”

“... Tony Blair’s political career (assuming his interminable delay actually ends in departure) is difficult to assess. He has been, electorally, the most successful British prime minister of the last hundred years: not even Baldwin or Thatcher quite equals him. Yet the record of his governments has been one of opportunities half-caught or missed entirely, of impulses that were sometimes admirable but rarely acted on, of reasonable but not unusual administrative competence, of some genuinely wrong-headed or shameful policies and, of course, a disastrous adventure abroad ...”

“... work. Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in ...”

“... Party forced HQ to confess to a figure of 208,000: half as many members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party’s achievable goal. People are leaving Labour in droves. To anyone outside the present administration the ...”

“... that the end was near. It came in February 1971, in the Minneapolis office of Harper’s owner John Cowles Jr and William Blair, the magazine’s president and its chief executive officer. Mailer had just written The Prisoner of Sex to be the whole cover for the March issue, and one of the other Minnesota businessmen at ...”

“... of his most famous essays tells its own story. Without the experiences enjoyed or endured by Eric Blair, Etonian, colonial enforcer, schoolteacher, down-and-out, grocer, infantryman, there would have been no George Orwell, writer. But much of what we know about Blair, we know from Orwell. And it’s not just a matter of ...”

“... thinks of his montages as sentences. The impression is that each work says one thing and one only. John Berger wrote of Kennard: ‘I would say his work was pure – if the word hadn’t become dirty.’Archive of Dissent, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (until 19 January), complicates the idea of Kennard’s work as univocal and determined. As a ...”

“... and appreciation of modern writers in that language as well as in the Classical tongues. Hugh Blair, a Church of Scotland minister who from 1762 became Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University, was in effect the world’s first Professor of English Literature. He built his lectures on Smith’s work. Smith held that ‘we in this ...”

“... to remember the importance of living up to his good intentions: Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole world’s business. The more that all nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a sense of equitable and humanitarian initiatives ...”

“... Civil War, mostly a much more accessible work, assumes that its readers will find the MP Sir John Culpepper’s remarks on monopolies in November 1640 ‘too well known to need quoting’. Any prospect of a rounded or balanced discussion of the ‘fall of the British monarchies’ is jettisoned by the decision to omit themes which have been or are being ...”

“... he doth smite you under the first rib.’ The pamphlet bears the influence of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, a recurring figure in Como’s radical coalition and the subject of Michael Braddick’s commanding and enlivening new biography. Lilburne fought courageously for Parliament as the nation’s defender against tyranny, but turned his eloquence and ...”

“... It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney and Beatrice. Yet, after almost a century, the Webbs’ thinking about local government – their disdain for civic initiative and zeal for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy ...”