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“... him he gives me joy.’ Balfour murmured that he was profoundly impressed. Compared with all this, Tony Blair’s fear that he might be thought ‘a nutter’ for taking an interest in religion seems rather tame. Yet one wonders how deeply committed to any of it Balfour really was. In his writings he could be eloquent about man’s desolation in an indifferent ...”

“... were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two ...”

“... 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 unsustainable in ...”

“... suggests in Dead Lions (2013) that something ‘seems a bit … unlikely’, Lamb replies: ‘Tony Blair’s a peace envoy. Compared to that, everything’s just business as usual.’ In London Rules (2018), talking to an ex-policeman who now does internal security at the Park (one of the ‘Dogs’), Lamb says: ‘“I quite like cops. You know where you ...”

“... activism. (At the same time, plenty of rave organisers, like Sunrise promoter turned cybercriminal Tony Colston-Hayter, were straight-up capitalists.) When John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign in 1993, ravers were an obvious target. A year later, his government passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police the ...”

“... yellow, teal and peach abound in the area. But with its high-ceilinged tenement flats, it attracts white bohemian types too. Morag Ramsay, a French and Spanish teacher, ushered me into her kitchen. There was a poster from a Cuban movie about Che Guevara on her kitchen wall. ‘I bought it on a street in Havana,’ she said. Ramsay, who is 59, had voted SNP all ...”

“... members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still infused with the raw brashness of tongues only recently ...”

“... be scythed through the city a hundred years later; its major monument today is a hangdog statue of Tony Hancock (who grew up in Bournemouth). Chamberlain claimed that the rents from Corporation Street’s commercial clients would make the project pay for itself – which they did, but not for ‘almost thirty years after his death, by which time his youngest ...”

“... is true even in the realm of national security. The principal security threats identified by the White House are WMD proliferation and elusive, non-state terrorist cells dispersed in cities in Western Europe, South-East Asia and throughout the world. But the Department of Defense is no better equipped to handle these problems than to take the lead in ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the styles was being refought, sort of. The protagonists were united in one bias: they loathed everything ...”

“... Olivier as a Roman patrician in the bathtub suggesting the joys of sex and power to the slave Tony Curtis; a cowboy riding a hydrogen bomb as if in a rodeo, an American strategy expert whose artificial arm keeps offering a Hitlerian salute; a large bone twirling into the sky in slow motion, the use of ‘The Blue Danube’ to accompany the circling ...”

“... Centre at Caversham is a treasure trove, but it’s also a labyrinth in which one expects to find white-haired historians still groping myopically along the endless shelves of files, doomed to uncover material so fascinating that all likelihood of ever finishing any work of scholarship has long since passed.If ever there was a historian to whom the phrase ...”

“... a thirty-acre estate in Southampton on Long Island, which he bought for $350,000 in 1926. Stanford White, a friend of the original owner, another Wall Street baron, designed the interior and ornamental bits in the garden. White was later shot by a jealous husband, a grace note that especially delighted Charlie. As a child ...”

“... new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the ...”