The Blair Years

Praise

“Alastair Campbell’s diaries provide a fascinating front row seat to the daily drama of the Blair premiership. American readers will be intrigued by Blair’s relations with the Clintons, with Bush post 9/11, with Condi, Cheney, Powell, Princess Diana and the Queen.”
—Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles

“Beyond question the most important and revelatory book so far written about the inner workings of Blair’s government . . . By turns arrogant, brilliant, combative, demotic and emotional, Campbell delivers his impressions and verdicts in a wholly committed, staccato style. It is an earthy account of life in the Blair government’s 24/7 media-centric world.”
–The Washington Post Book World

“The Blair Years is a classic text of the you-are-there school of politics at work. Surely a valuable source for scholars to scour for many years to come, it is available here and now as one of the most compelling reads of history in the raw . . . The diaries provide a behind-the-scenes look at dramatic junctures in recent history.”
–Los Angeles Times


Reviews from Britain:

“This is a brilliant, absorbing account . . . Vivid, direct, immediate, and honest in its way, the diary draws you into a world for which ‘evil’ is hardly too strong a word . . . Rich in detail, powerful in mood, honest within its own lights, it is the more intriguing for the dark and often unspoken presence, at its core, of a mystery: the Master, Blair . . . These diaries will be gasped at, and relied upon, for decades to come. Buy them: they will suck you in.”
–The Times

“This is a riveting, compelling and genuinely revelatory book . . . The Campbell that comes across in these diaries is certainly a complex and interesting character: . . . engagingly frank, with a winning line in black humour, a certain blokeish faux-naivety when faced with an array of international statesmen and an unrivalled understanding of how the tabloid press works.”
–The Sunday Times

“There are fascinating details and revelatory nuggets . . . Campbell brings back to vivid and gripping life the night that Diana died [and] when Nato was losing public opinion over Kosovo.”
–The Observer

“Electric . . . Campbell is a first-rate diarist [with] a very acute eye for the telling detail . . . He has a novelist’s ability to reveal character through a close study of behaviour and–rare in a political diarist–an artist’s understanding that it is the smallest things which reveal the most . . . The portrait of Tony Blair is by turns endearing and unnervingly frightening . . . This is a perfect piece of diary-writing: eagle-eyed, gossipy, funny.”
–Mail on Sunday