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“... until command finds a need for it as justification for political policy.’ The phantom of Tony Blair, brandishing his dodgy dossier, shimmers into sight. Tree of Smoke puts the Vietnam War more explicitly in the context of the wars that went before it. The defining moments of the colonel’s life were his capture by the Japanese in Burma in ...”

“... then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police questioned him about his failure to disclose his brother’s ...”

“... 10 June 1993. Fellow-guests with Tony and Cherie Blair at a BBC dinner. Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s 50th birthday?’ She answers: ‘Yes, and you neither came nor replied ...”

“... that the Daily Express quoted Richards from the book on the subject of the Iraq war: ‘I sent [Tony Blair] a letter saying it was too late to pull out now baby, you had better stick to the guns. If I had spare time I’d go out there and give them a shot or two myself … I’d terrify them!’ Could I have missed this? There’s nothing in the ...”

“... example: the Iraq war. (I know, I know, we have to move on sometime, but this is important.) Tony Blair went to war in the face of widespread (though by no means universal) public scepticism. He justified this course of action on two grounds. First, it was his job to take a lead, even if the public did not like it. The implication here was that the ...”

“... the Republican right mean there’s now no prospect of the bill being adopted, let alone signed. Tony Blair, in a speech in September, acknowledged that climate change could be ‘so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence’. He identified the rate of change as ‘simply ...”

“... all sides to the negotiating table, at first tentatively under John Major’s government, then by Tony Blair. ‘Various factors’, Leahy writes (one of his favourite phrases), contributed to the IRA’s decision to call ceasefires in 1994 and then in 1997 after the New Labour and Fianna Fáil governments in London and Dublin dropped their demands for ...”

“... but it was now tightly bound to improvements in economic efficiency and consumer experiences. When Tony Blair used the word ‘modernisation’, he meant driving competition into public services. The idea of the ‘modern’ was shorn of its utopian or politically disruptive implications, provoking the suggestion that the future no longer existed, at ...”

“... The resistance is too well entrenched in the Sunni Arab provinces of Iraq for it to be eradicated. Tony Blair, echoing Iyad Allawi, speaks of 14 out of 18 provinces being completely safe, but everybody in Iraq knows this is untrue. The Iraqi, American and British governments can maintain this myth about peaceful parts of Iraq only because they are too ...”

“... Thatcherism continues to cast its long shadow over British politics. At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to be moving back to it. During the campaign it was difficult to be sure what image best captured the brooding presence of the eponymous Lady ...”

“... therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy. In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s ...”

“... to upward mobility. (Goldthorpe tells a nice story about a Cabinet Office seminar at which one of Blair’s chief political advisers protested: ‘But Tony can’t possibly go to the country on a platform of increasing downward mobility!’) In the effort to address equality of opportunity, the silence around downward ...”

“... had contained clothes, clothes that were subsequently traced to the shop of a Maltese man called Tony Gauci. Gauci later became a key prosecution witness. Fragments of a circuit board and a Toshiba radio were also recovered and identified as parts of the bomb. Twelve years later, on 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges convicted a former Libyan ...”

“... shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel haunts Kray foot-soldier Tony Lambrianou like a psychogeographical nightmare. The route he drove that fated night is a mantra he can never stifle: Evering Road, Lower Clapton Road, Narrow Way, Mare Street, Cambridge Heath Road, Commercial Road, East India Dock Road, Blackwall Tunnel. The ...”

“... At first sight, the Hutton Report seemed to provide further evidence of Tony Blair’s intuitive political genius. It was extraordinary to have reaped from the appointment of Lord Hutton a set of findings which transformed a crisis that threatened to be overwhelming into a vindication of every aspect of the government’s conduct, and of the prime minister’s moral probity in particular ...”