“... and blamed Hizbullah’s very existence for the current violence. Meanwhile Tony Blair – in an ironic reversal of the Blair Doctrine, which calls for intervention for humanitarian reasons – has called for more UN peacekeepers to be deployed in southern Lebanon ‘to protect Israel’. Together Bush and ...”

“... the history of New Labour. The hunt for the Third Way, which has been going on more or less since Blair announced the birth of New Labour, is in many respects paradoxical. It is not obvious why a government which prides itself on its pragmatism and freedom from ideological baggage should spend so much of its time trying to acquire a new ideological ...”

“... by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”

“... Fifty years, almost to the month, before the publication of John Adamson’s book, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated his intention to write what he knew would be ‘a very long book’, the most ambitious of his career, on the Puritan revolution of 17th-century England. The project went through many mutations over the next four years, but by 1961 it was virtually complete ...”

“... albeit recent history, in understanding the present state of affairs. If Brown, no less than Blair, has shown himself intent on proving that this is a new sort of Labour government, it is because both of them dwelt so long in the shadow of reproaches from the past. Both were determined to live down Labour’s reputation for financial ...”

“... Tony Blair​ ’s long-winded memoir A Journey (2010) is strikingly light on self-recrimination. He regrets ‘with every fibre of my being’ the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise ...”

“... spoke. This was Gordon like I’ve never seen him before. He spoke with real passion. As good as Blair at his best, coming out fighting. He sat down to a thunderous, heartfelt standing ovation, entirely spontaneous. Anyone who thinks Gordon will go quietly, however rough the going gets, is badly mistaken. 12 May. For the second day running the spotlight is ...”

“... to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting staff, a ‘hole in the centre’ of government was perceived ...”

“... Service it’s a more useful investment of public money than any number of state visits, or, in Blair’s case, holidays with Berlusconi (who, incidentally, I never hear mentioned throughout). 29 January, Rome. Seduced by its name, first thing this morning we go to look at Nero’s Golden House, or such parts of it as have been excavated. It’s a ...”

“... among them. Only at the end of the 17th century, through the editorial endeavours of John Toland and other radical Whig publicists, did standing armies and the Major-Generals emerge as the great evil of Cromwellian Government. It is when we trace the historical reputation of the Major-Generals that broader implications for the study of early ...”

“... a government that is implementing much of the programme he urged on his own party. Just as much as Blair and Cameron, Clegg aims to replace British social democracy with a version of Thatcher’s market-based settlement. The confidence with which Clegg defended the shift to market liberalism is striking, not least because the collapse of the market liberal ...”

“... Fulke Greville, whose life of Sidney is the more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and ...”

“... 30 years on, Lance Price, himself a former BBC reporter who then worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair, has brought the story up to the present (his title and subtitle are on much the same lines as Margach’s). At first blush, it is hard to see that much has changed. Price is particularly good at showing how half the prime ministers of the last hundred ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad ...”