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“... Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I contributed the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at Edinburgh, had defied in the most practical way by ...”

“... exploiting well-worn anecdotes. Moorcock sketches his version of the late Derek Raymond (a.k.a. Robin Cook) as a Soho revenant: ‘Cookie was still alive in those days . . . and telling your stories back to you faster than you could recount them.’ Much of King of the City is like that, using the ‘twist’ to reconstitute chat rehearsed by ...”

“... and cut its diplomatic ties with Taiwan was South Africa, late last year. Nelson Mandela, like Robin Cook, knows, or thinks he knows, that the huge potential market of the PRC is more important than human rights. You might expect that such hypocrisy would depress the Taiwanese, but not a bit of it. Used to living on the edge of the world’s ...”

“... and Brown himself is not an ideal successor: see the London Underground. Furthermore, unlike Robin Cook, he is even less likely to finish New Labour’s unfinished constitutional business than Blair. But he will not continually undermine Labour’s real achievements, as Blair has done in his will-o’-the-wisp pursuit of ‘choice’. Nor will he be ...”

“... Yet I could see that much of this rough treatment of female refugees was a direct consequence of Robin Cook telling the world that there was evidence of rape camps inside Kosovo. ‘Young women are being separated from the refugee columns,’ he said, ‘and forced to undergo systematic rape in an army camp. We have evidence from many refugees who have ...”

“... son and his friend to the cinema when she was called into the Commons to deputise for her boss, Robin Cook, who was stuck in Edinburgh. She says it would have been easy enough to change her plans, but ‘my maternal self-esteem, precarious at the best of times, would have collapsed altogether if I turned into one of those parents who let their children ...”

“... a crisis of leadership. ‘The only plausible alternative to Tony Blair is not Gordon Brown but Robin Cook,’ was Ross McKibbin’s challenging conclusion in the LRB last month – all members of the present Cabinet are thereby disqualified from the succession. But although Cook’s manifest vindication warrants his ...”

“... The notions that made their mark on the magazine were more individualist, radical-liberal ones. Robin Cook’s personal credo is more obviously New Statesmanly than Blair’s: ‘what attracted me to the Labour Party was not the values of collectivism but the values of individualism, of rebellion, of freedom, of liberation from the machinery of state ...”

“... the country and say why. The only plausible alternative to Tony Blair is not Gordon Brown but Robin Cook. Cook, however, has not made the most of his opportunities. The Foreign Office is no place for a politician of progressive ideas and as a progressive he never made the most of his comparatively short time as ...”

“... aims. ‘The future of socialism may lie more with William Morris than with Herbert Morrison,’ Robin Cook said in 1987. Morris died over ninety years ago, but remains wise and relevant for his insistence on combining social justice with a respect for nature. Can the Left recover his kind of vision, and can it win the support of its fellow-citizens? Or ...”

“... events. The entry for Wednesday, 1 May 2002 reports a warning by the then Leader of the House, Robin Cook, at a meeting of the Labour Parliamentary Committee. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. ‘We are in a jam. Few members have yet tumbled to the juggernaut heading their way.’ Mullin explains that ‘under the Freedom ...”

“... allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is ...”

“... playing Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken place six months before, and the advent of the SNP had kicked Scottish politics into life. It was a talking rather than a dancing party, and the politics themselves seemed intoxicating enough. Around two we ...”

“... have seemed. Although his ministers might not have acted as impulsively as Blair has, only one, Robin Cook (or two, if we count Clare Short’s rather eccentric departure), resigned in protest – and that is shocking. All his other ministers at least acquiesced in the prime minister’s policies and, more usually, strongly defended them. They did so ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious ...”