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“... a veteran of the 1974 debacle, performed a series of craven contortions as he compliantly followed Tony Blair’s mazy hesitations on devolution. Blair was an instinctive centraliser and control freak, who breezily likened the projected Scottish Parliament to an English parish council, yet in his early years as party leader also felt constrained to observe the ...”

“... to New Times, Leavis to Lyotard, Aldermaston to ethnicity. He is also a Marxian version of Dorian Gray, a preternaturally youthful character whose personal style evokes a range of faded American epithets: hip, neat, cool, right-on. There are two ways to recount his story, one less charitable than the other. The more jaundiced narrative is one of a relentless ...”

“... did, as well as more recent experimenters such as Hopkins, John Berryman or the sub-Prynnean Tony Lopez. Donne and Hopkins used sonnets as vehicles for religious anguish because it’s so easy to suggest that they’re buckling under pressure, that the spirit will not run true to the form, or to God. The sonnet has a structure that invites mild ...”

“... few achieve media ubiquity without being turned on, in one way or another – whether they’re Tony Blair, David Beckham, Princess Diana or Kate McCann. For Burn, celebrity is an irresistible force that always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the ...”

“... detractors, who left us such cautionary documents as The Hidden Persuaders and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man’s mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker’s ...”

“... in his beliefs. His manifesto promised ‘change’, but its real commitments were sparse. Unlike Tony Blair, Starmer inherits a broken and dysfunctional country. Where Blair surfed a burgeoning economic boom and aspired to a frictionless world united under Visa, Starmer’s Britain is stuck in protracted accidie, economically DOA and beset by a deep – if ...”

“... the dread of being abandoned and left alone ...    I dont envy the woman who has married Tony, if she has; she’ll have to keep the handle of a Hoover in the house. Nicholas Jenkins’s note tells us that ‘ “Tony” has not been identified,’ which is probably just as well. Another letter from three months ...”

“... and was hired on arrival by the patron of the Los Angeles Times, Colonel (later General) Harrison Gray Otis. Lummis helped to forge the booster image described by Kevin Starr in his book Inventing the dream: ‘a mélange of mission myth (originating in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona), obsession with climate, political conservatism (symbolised in the open ...”

“... the gift of the gab who sells the plebs down the river in Julius Caesar; similarly, the role of ‘Tony Blair’, played by the actor of the same name. Writing in Die Zeit (14 June 2007), Geuss cited Blair’s catch-all answer to intelligence and military advisers who knew far more about the situation on the ground in Iraq than he did: ‘But Saddam is ...”

“... were never given an address, but their accents suggested London or its suburbs, perhaps close to Tony Hancock’s place in East Cheam, definitely somewhere below the middle of the social scale, a place where couples necked in front parlours and publicans called ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ but not so far down as to be picturesque and identifiable and ...”

“... as the poetic landscapes between its covers’, which included those of Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth and the Border ballads. But it was British in a determinedly monolingual way (Palgrave even worried about including Burns’s Scottish dialect). He included nothing medieval (none of his poets was born before the 1550s), and, after a minor tussle ...”

“... The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a rule, not ...”

“... be fucked if I can.’ Back man: ‘Well, you’ll be fucked if you can’t.’ End – Tony. He might have meant ‘I’ll be fucked if you can’t.’ The letters suggest that Hecht was a normal, almost jolly boy. This may have been a performance, and perhaps the memories described in ‘Apprehensions’ are closer to what mattered: We were ...”

“... writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when she and ...”

“... campaign. But it was also personal. Behind the statistic of 35 deaths a year was the mother of Tony Garnett, Up the Junction’s story editor. She had died of septicaemia following a backstreet abortion in the early 1940s, when Tony was five years old. Nineteen days later his father committed suicide.One of the ...”