“In bookshops up and down the country, a new kind of literary movement is taking place,” says Laurie Penny in a report for the New Statesman. “Hundreds of young protesters are strolling in to stores and quietly moving copies of Tony Blair‘s autobiography from the display stacks on to shelves devoted to mystery and crime fiction. Blair’s smug visage on the dust jacket of A Journey is of a man who knows that the public is finally buying his side of the story, at least technically speaking. By placing that creepy grin firmly underneath a big sign that says ‘Crime’, these guerrilla librarians are trying to make sure that people know what they’re getting into.”

They’re nice guerrillas, too, she notes — “polite to the point of self-parody. A serious and energetic discussion is taking place on the group’s Facebook page about whether or not the demonstration will overly inconvenience hard-working bookshop employees.”

But what has her so energized is not just the protest of Blair’s “smug visage” — “It’s this sort of thing that gives me hope for my generation,” she says.

The public outrage that has accompanied Blair’s book-signings – with shoes and eggs flung at the former premier in Dublin early this month – is no longer really about Blair himself. It’s not even wholly about the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq since 2003 and in Afghanistan since 2001. Ultimately, this is about us – about the generation that came to political awareness in the earliest years of the 21st century and the stories we tell ourselves about neoliberalism, globalisation and the articulation of politics.