Twitter Highlights

Twitter provides, for big Twitter users such as The Independent, a service called Analytics, which summarises activity (favourites, retweets and replies in the right-hand columns). Thus I can present the most popular tweets of the past 24 hours, if you want to catch up:

Germany manages to sell 6x as many goods to China as UK [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 9:48 am

The Dawn of Time

My esteemed colleague Jack Riley, head of digital at the Independent and Evening Standard, is leaving to join AOL/Huffington Post. I wish him well, and want to pay tribute to him for the success of The Independent on the web, but also, more selfishly, for helping me into the digital world.
I started blogging in 2007, [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 6:58 pm

Forthcoming Titles

I am pleased to say that Faber Finds is reissuing my 2001 biography, Tony Blair: Prime Minister, as a paperback and e-book on 20 June. It comes in a plain cigarette wrapper (pictured).
The new edition has a 20,000-word Afterword to cover the 2001-07 period and to provide an assessment of Blair’s record as Prime Minister.
I [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 8 May 2013 at 9:43 pm

Lloyd George: My Part in His Downfall

The 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs held its 90th anniversary celebration last night. The committee was founded, as any pedant knows, in 1923. I was grateful to Graham Brady, the chairman, for inviting me. Gervais Rentoul, MP for Lowestoft and the founding chairman of the Committee, was my second cousin twice removed (his great-grandfather, [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 24 April 2013 at 11:44 am

Into the Top 140

I should like to thank my mum.
And those good people at Time who have listed me as one of the 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013.
Distinguished company and all, in a list beginning with Chelsea Clinton, Mia Farrow and Bill Gates. Especially as I currently have a stripe across my face (it’s a another rather [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 25 March 2013 at 10:20 pm

Oh! You Pretty Things

We got a little carried away with the Bowie worship in the office last week. This, below, was in The Independent on Sunday today (not online), as part of an “i on Sunday” feature on “The Man Who Fooled the World” (by releasing a single when we all thought he had retired).
Sorry. Respectable visiting professor service [...]

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 13 January 2013 at 9:56 pm

My 2013 Google Chrome Alphabet

What comes up when you type a letter and “Enter” into the address bar of your browser? I did this last year, but it hasn’t changed much, so it is even duller and more self-obsessed this year.

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 2 January 2013 at 2:25 pm

Traveller Returns

I returned from my fact-finding mission to the eurozone periphery in time for the Olympics closing ceremony.

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 13 August 2012 at 11:27 am

Seaside absence

Receiving urgent inquiry about my absence from the internet, I realise that I forgot to put a picture of a bucket and spade on the blog to announce my annual fact-finding mission to the eurozone periphery to see for myself the dawning realisation that the euro is going to have to break up.

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 2 August 2012 at 12:00 am

I’ll have that on my gravestone: “Not far wrong”

Me, me, me. The first thing I did when I got a review copy of the fourth volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries was to look myself up in the index. On 24 September 2001, he wrote: “John Rentoul had a very good line on the ‘psychologically flawed relationship’ and it wasn’t far wrong.”

By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 19 June 2012 at 10:08 am