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“... than through the violent and often treacherous turns of armed revolution.’ Now everyone from Tony Blair to Tony Benn agrees with that. Less convincing perhaps is Cooper’s claim that Allende ‘had few counterparts among politicians of the 20th century’. (How would Gandhi rate, you wonder, against the bold but ...”

“... But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader intoxicated with whisky than one like Blair, intoxicated with himself. 17 January. At the Annual General Meeting of the Friends of the British Library I read (rather haltingly) a piece I’ve written about the libraries I’ve worked in, including the Round Reading Room at the old Public Record ...”

“... to ‘self-defence’ and blamed Hizbullah’s very existence for the current violence. Meanwhile Tony Blair – in an ironic reversal of the Blair Doctrine, which calls for intervention for humanitarian reasons – has called for more UN peacekeepers to be deployed in southern Lebanon ‘to protect Israel’. Together ...”

“... see a TV image of toy tanks massing at the Kuwait border, to Shock and Awe (2008), a portrait of Tony Blair as a wannabe gunslinger in a firefight turned cataclysmic. His best work in this vein is the sequence of three paintings on the Troubles: The Citizen (1981-83), which shows an emaciated IRA prisoner who has gone ‘on the blanket’ and smeared ...”

“... What of their former patron? General Musharraf is just back from a successful US tour and, like Tony Blair, has been offered a campus sinecure to give him time to brief a ghost-writer and hasten the appearance of his memoirs. Instead, the general, realising that he is now more popular than Zardari, is campaigning to share power with him. There is talk ...”

“... stakes have never been higher. The occasion was the Future of Britain conference, organised by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and presided over by the man himself. Its theme was that British politics is failing to meet the challenges or seize the opportunities of the 21st century. There were sessions on technological transformation, on ...”

“... and the man who on present showing is likely to be prime minister of Australia after September, Tony Abbott, have spoken up for the Anglosphere. In Britain, the Anglosphere is held up as an alternative way to exercise influence in the world by Nigel Farage’s Ukip and the ten Conservative MPs who have openly declared their desire to see the country leave ...”

“... for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are studying it carefully. They can legitimately enjoy the more egregious mistakes made by the Tories since 1979, but they should be sparing with their scorn. They should remember the errors of previous administrations; and be thankful they did ...”

“... negotiations over the publication of minutes of cabinet meetings and the correspondence between Tony Blair and George W. Bush delayed things by a year. In 2014 it was agreed that a ‘small number of full extracts from the minutes of [Cabinet] meetings’ thought to be ‘most critical’ could be published. The sensitivity of the ...”

“... Tony Blair​ ’s long-winded memoir A Journey (2010) is strikingly light on self-recrimination. He regrets ‘with every fibre of my being’ the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise ...”

“... the history of New Labour. The hunt for the Third Way, which has been going on more or less since Blair announced the birth of New Labour, is in many respects paradoxical. It is not obvious why a government which prides itself on its pragmatism and freedom from ideological baggage should spend so much of its time trying to acquire a new ideological ...”

“... to pursue a more muscular punishment, he warns, an Israeli attack is a ‘near certainty’. Tony Blair, we must assume, would agree. The risks involved, Goldberg conceded, are enormous: ‘a full-blown regional war’; the end of the special relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington; a ‘cataclysmic’ rise in oil prices; terrorist attacks on ...”

“... as Labour, a collective implosion over a failure to win a seat they didn’t capture even under Blair – and which until recently was safe enough for a sitting Tory prime minister – seems foolish. Blaming Khan occludes misgivings in the party about the decision of the London regional office to focus on candidate selections for next year’s election ...”

“... regimes who keep both radical Islamists and liberal democrats at bay. When George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq they promoted the idea that the West was facing a worldwide jihadi threat led by al-Qaida. The global war on terror was against a single enemy: radical Islam. At first, each manifestation of that threat was attacked with massive ...”

“... It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney and Beatrice. Yet, after almost a century, the Webbs’ thinking about local government – their disdain for civic initiative and zeal for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy ...”