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“... but now I think, emphatically, that he was right. In fact, it isn’t possible to come away from Andrew Adonis’s crisp and affectionate Life with any other impression. Adonis is naturally more light-footed than Alan Bullock was in his three-volume masterwork on Bevin (Bullock only allotted Hitler a single, though ...”

“... blokes of whom he approves. Bill Clinton is ‘a great guy’, as is the Taoiseach John Bruton. Andrew Smith is ‘a nice guy’, and so is Guy Verhofstadt; Andrew Adonis is ‘a thoroughly nice guy’. John Hutton is also ‘a thoroughly nice guy’, while the footmen at Balmoral are ‘very nice guys’. The ...”

“... would be reached in much the same time as the present two and a quarter hours). At the time, Andrew Adonis was the number two transport minister. A long-time devotee of the railways, having joined the Cotswold Line Promotion Group as a teenager in the 1980s, he began pushing for Labour to support a new north-south line. Geoff Hoon, the transport ...”

“... could thrash out a deal. On the Labour side, Laws’s old friend (and a former Liberal Democrat) Andrew Adonis was still keen to explore the options but the rest of them just didn’t seem that interested. Peter Mandelson was detached (‘Surely the rich have suffered enough,’ he says at one point, when Laws tries to find some common ground on ...”

“... itself. All these intriguing details, and many more of a similar nature, are squirrelled away in Andrew Adonis’s extraordinary lumber-room of a book. My first visit to the Other Place, some thirty years ago, remains a vivid memory because the conditions were so similar to those described by Adonis. After recovering ...”

“... and independence from the LEAs, were a precedent, but it seems to have been the influence of Andrew Adonis on Blair that drove the academies forward. Adonis, who is now a minister in the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and was previously in Blair’s Policy Unit, has no roots in the labour movement ...”

“... an excess of journalistic moralism, one finds both arguments at the same time, as in a review by Andrew Adonis with which Otte has some sport.This book, then, is a reading for our times. It is a defence of Grey’s self-contained realism, tempered by regret at his failure to communicate his policy. It is a critique of his critics’ fantasies of British ...”

“... an ‘orderly transition’. Blair is therefore deeply impressed by a letter he gets from Andrew Adonis, setting his predicament in historical context. 1. There are no ‘dignified exits’ and ‘orderly transitions’ – just exits and transitions, all more or less ragged and unsatisfactory. That’s life, I suppose. 2. The more successful ...”

“... video shot by Sam Taylor-Johnson of Beckham asleep in his Madrid hotel room revealed a stunning Adonis. Bare-chested with flopping blond hair, Taylor-Johnson captured the Sleeping Beauty, the icon.’I mean, Jilly Cooper couldn’t improve on that, and neither could Defoe. But the Defoe tradition isn’t kind to women. Moll Flanders is a con artist, a ...”

“... without reservation’. In addition, this is the authorised biography (a task first assigned to Andrew Adonis and then handed on), written with the full collaboration of Jennifer Jenkins. Although Campbell is too intelligent a writer to be content with any kind of hagiography and too well informed about recent British politics not to recognise ...”

“... to be stamped so obviously with femininity, and liable to humiliation worse than Venus’ with Adonis, purely by reason of my accidental but flaunting sex. These are twisted feelings – with a prose that can do the twist – but Smart’s honesty radiates upwards. All that one can say is that parents engaged in such a danse macabre can have a lovely and ...”

“... I die?’ does have a not far from Shakespearean ring to it: nothing like “Venus and Adonis’, but very likely from the same belfry as ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. But Taylor does not spend time interpreting the poem. He uses internal evidence as fact, and rather dubiously. By modernising the text, for instance, he alters some of the facts and ...”

“... which was too literary for performance, and a clutch of poems; the lyrical, mythological Adonis was rewarded by Fouquet, the young King’s guardian and First Minister. La Fontaine had found not only a patron but someone to admire. Fouquet was a grasshopper (his successor, Colbert, was the ant): he was a man who knew how to enjoy his power and vast ...”

“... poem as well as Joyce’s novel), The Rape of the Lock (Pope’s), Venus and Adonis (anyone’s), Leviathan (it sounded like Decameron) and Self-Help by Samuel Smiles’. He also devises a literary test for immigrants comprising the opening lines of Piers Plowman. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he observes, ‘how many Indo-Chinese don’t ...”

“... Bearman’s Shakespeare in the Stratford Records, 1994) but by the work of Peter Thomson and Andrew Gurr on the fortunes of Elizabethan acting companies, or of Douglas Bruster on Troilus and Cressida and the language of Jacobean economics, or of R.A. Foakes and Stephen Greenblatt on the contexts of King Lear. This is one biography which doesn’t forget ...”