It starts out competently enough as a kind of homage to Ray Bradbury's classic "Fahrenheit 451," in which a once-zealous government book burner comes to question his calling.
A View From the Foothills by Chris Mullin 590pp, Profile Books, £20 Reading Chris Mullin's diaries of the Blair years it is hard to imagine that the author was once a zealous, Bennite firebrand, editor of Tribune during the turbulent early 1980s and author of a handy guide on how to deselect your MP.
"The change is startling, he was once a zealous prosecutor," said reporter Tom Foreman, who later added: "This is simply so astonishing, this is a very big change for a man who once said 'there were no 'small crimes.'".
Overall, the system may not have brought the inquisitorial traditions of Capitol Hill to Westminster in quite the way of which some zealous reformers once dreamed - though the fearlessness of congressional committees can sometimes be exaggerated - but the reform continues to provide the framework of a genuinely effective form of parliamentary scrutiny, if not always the actuality.
Evoking memories of the zealous prosecutor that he once was, Mr. Spitzer took a hard-line stance.
Meanwhile the residue of attitudes and practices once foisted on everyone by the zealous still dog and bedevil us, as witness the poor benighted Catholic Poles suffering at the sight of what - you have to larf - they presumably believe God created.
He is, however, zealous about political ethics: he once issued orders banning Silvio Berlusconi's companies from distributing his films in Italy.
He quoted the Austrian School, the once-obscure but newly vocal group of zealous free-market economists who trace their roots to the Hapsburg Empire, disdain the scientific method in economics and blame the Fed for the financial crisis and the faltering recovery.
Still, labels put zealous effort into finding heirs, especially once Arctic Monkeys' first album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, became the fastest-selling British debut of all time in January 2006.
