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“... Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels ...”

“... It Just Me . . . ? that have also – or at any rate might well have – appeared on Spoons are: Tony Blair, chick-lit, city breaks, Sofia Coppola, Alain de Botton, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Tracey Emin, exercise videos, foot spas, Ikea, improving the value of your property, Boris Johnson, Kabbalah, lastminute.com, Live8, loft-living, loyalty cards, the ...”

“... came out in 1999. The narrator, Frankie Blue, is a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony – formally, Anthony Diamonte – is a flash Italian hairdresser: handsome, charming, apparently successful, he has a flair for cruelty. Nodge – or Noj, Jon backwards – is an overweight ...”

“... Nun flows in torrents. Countercultural types speak fondly of Richard Branson. Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons are hip. In other words, there’s a fair amount of easy, nostalgic, hindsight-tickling fun, combined with multiple coming-of-age tales, some forecasts of political gloom and a couple of unresolved mysteries. A TV version is on the way. Coe’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a grim, stagnant time’ – you get the picture. And as the centre was finally refusing to hold, Parsons builds to the climactic revelation of where George’s family in Bushey, Herts, stood: ‘the Panos family ... were largely untouched by the gathering of the socio-political storm clouds.’ On to 1981: ‘England burned ... young rioters hurling ...”

“... for reassurance about the wonders of male normalcy. They look for all this in the way people like Tony Parsons have taught them, in a spirit of soft-core irony and hard-core sentiment. But apart from reassurance and a sort of avenging pride, what are these magazines selling to their readers? With their grisly combinations of sensitivity and debasement ...”

“... Fred and Judy Vermorel’s Sex Pistols (1978), a snapshot album with trashy, knowing captions and Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill’s The boy looked at Johnny (also 1978), a book of scurrilous mythologies adapted from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, are elegantly tacky and anti-intellectual exercises in mimetic form. Greil Marcus’s much-admired ...”

“... was quite exceptional in bringing a successful defamation suit against her accuser, Mary Parsons, a brickmaker’s wife, who was made to pay a fine to avoid being ‘well whipped’. Marshfield was more fortunate than the quarrelsome midwife Margaret Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary ...”

“... It turns out that the dock leaves of Mantel and Mills were growing near the nettles of not-quite-Tony Parsons all along. The list of recommended authors itself resembles a scrupulously balanced prize shortlist – three men, three women – with a corrective anti-metropolitan bias, the named writers having birthplaces in ...”

“... reconstruction project in Iraq – oil-related programmes aside. The contract was given to Parsons Global Services, which quickly subcontracted most of the work. The centres were supposed to be open and treating patients by last December. By March this year, three-quarters of the budget had been spent. Of the 150 centres, 135 were partially ...”

“... your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation ...”

“... A major in the Royal Anglian Regiment talks to Tony Parker about battle: I’ve only been in that kind of situation where someone’s been shooting at me, a total of about twelve times altogether – in Ireland, in Aden, and we had a couple of dust-ups with the Eoka lot in Cyprus. You get a little bit of headiness out of the situation, you do, because that’s what you’ve been trained for ...”

“... Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many of ...”

“... proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally direct and sophisticated treatment of sexual behaviour is one of the strengths of her fiction. In The Wind ...”