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“... Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels than it does to its Caribbean ancestry. John Blair isn’t overly preoccupied with definitions, though he is keen to make clear that the modern vampire is only one element in a pan-historical complex of beliefs. Etymology can be valuable however when tracing the transmission of beliefs between ...”

“... There was a very good case to be made for Tony Blair’s handling of the Iraq issue. His critics never sufficiently acknowledged his efforts to play a difficult hand in a difficult game. He is nobody’s poodle. It was wise, rather than craven, not to isolate the Americans, still smarting from the affront as well as the horror of 11 September ...”

“... Farley’s 1783 edition of Domesday Book published by Phillimore under the general editorship of John Morris, as part of their ‘History from the Sources’ series. This was put in hand in 1969 and the first parts were published in 1975; the work was delayed by Dr Morris’s death in 1977. This now-completed edition, which includes a supplementary-volume ...”

“... was not a success. Accusing the Tories of having no policies didn’t work either. ‘Tony Blair says it’s all style and no substance,’ Cameron told the Conservative party conference last year. ‘In fact he wrote me a letter about it. Dear Kettle, You’re black. Signed Pot.’ On issues ranging from civil liberties to aviation, Labour has ...”

“... in 1997, we would not have had to endure the unnecessary and insulting performance that Tony Blair put on last week in the uterine comfort of his constituency in the North-East: that other Labour Party could never have followed him so slavishly wherever he chose to take them in the wake of George Bush, would have known it needed at all costs to replace ...”

“... was spoken of among her colleagues as the Coming Man. She reported back a day or so later. ‘Tony Blair.’ ‘Never heard of him.’ ‘He’s a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use ...”

“... about what has been coming out, and about whether some beloved work has stood the test of time’. John Morrill has identified a hungry constituency to whom his book will be a godsend. The width and depth of Morrill’s reading are awesome. How else can one appropriately respond to the book than by resolving guiltily to get up earlier and work harder? Morrill ...”

“... had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked long and hard for the Liberals in his native ...”

“... by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which is, let’s not forget, still in power. The phenomenon seemed odd when it began – Lance Price was called in front of a Parliamentary ...”

“... What can best be called clear water has started showing, happily, between the Blair regime’s incommensurate ambitions in respect of new weaponry and its chances of being able to realise them. The two new aircraft-carriers that our visionary Government is hankering after in pursuance of the world role it feels obliged to play, won’t by all accounts be as big as it had hoped, because unless this tabled hardware is downsized there won’t be the money on hand to pay for it ...”

“... Like many others I have been puzzled by the reaction to John Smith’s death. It was reported as though it were at least that of a prime minister, and his funeral was, as the BBC noted, in effect a state funeral. The decision of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive ...”

“... John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell article’, in which he criticised ‘a large part of the British Left’ for its opposition to the war in Iraq, described the Statesman as ‘a sort of upmarket version of the Daily Mirror’, and concluded that because ‘the NS believes that Blair and the US are the problem, not the solution,’ it was ‘time to recognise that Blairites like me should not appear regularly in its pages ...”

“... One aspect of Tony Blair’s memoir was under-celebrated when it was published last year: its remarkable handling of style.* For a 700-page book that was written in a hurry, A Journey’s register is very carefully judged. (Even the grammatical errors are impressively consistent: ‘The weeping and gnashing of teeth is pointless’; ‘The manifesto and the mandate was one for New Labour’; ‘I was reasonably settled in my mind that two terms was enough ...”

“... he had been acting in when marching lockstep into Iraq with his role model in Washington. Tony Blair’s assurance was given as a response to the publication of the Butler Report (Stationery Office, £22.50), which he assumes has demonstrated that he is not in fact the Bliar of all those banners that were carried down Whitehall eighteen months ago. The ...”

“... especially the Sun, had played a central role in beating Labour in the 1992 general election. When Blair took over as leader in 1994, he had an overwhelming sense that he needed to court the press, in particular the party’s traditional enemies on the right. As he said in 2000, Under Thatcher . . . they got drunk on the power she let them wield and then ...”