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“... framework for everything that followed was set by Attlee: he was the one who had to face the Cold War, who authorised the building of a British atom bomb and drew up detailed preparations for World War Three. The Chiefs of Staff, fearing an imminent Soviet attack, threatened their collective resignation in order to force ...”

“... riding a horse called Proletarian Strength travels around with his Sancho Panza during the Civil War, observing the bizarre efforts of various isolated idealists to make a new revolutionary life. The novella Vprok (For Future Benefit) applied a similar approach to collectivisation. The Foundation Pit, never published in Platonov’s lifetime because of the ...”

“... like tens of thousands of other families, were nearly a year into a bewildering, unnatural war. Mobilised troops struggled to work out where they were, never mind what they were doing or why. Robert Rodway was 28, but many of his fellow soldiers in the Westminster Red Regiment were much younger, just apprentices. None had fought before; only a few in ...”

“... to it – indeed its existence was first exposed to the world by the publication of Djilas’s New Class in 1956. The fullest account of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union is contained in Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura (1984). This shows how the privileged – by rank and, increasingly, by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of ...”

“... removal from Nazism to England and final ascent towards Cambridge, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents – hapless English father and fragile Austrian mother, both dead by the time he was 14 – sketch one psychological background; Jewish descent on both sides in the most anti-semitic city in Europe, another. He explains the ...”

“... York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city. It became the second most populous city in England in 1911, and in Britain forty years later, overtaking Glasgow. Today, some believe the title should go to Manchester, even though ...”

“... himself as being ‘très fatiguë’ the result, he said, of a long period as a prisoner of war in Germany. He had passed the competitive examination for entrance to the Ecole in 1939, having prepared the concours in the khâgne at Lyons, where he had been the student of Jean Lacroix (who has recently retired as the philosophy correspondent of Le Monde ...”

“... uninterested in all the things men like, such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.In November 1947, Channon dined with Somerset Maugham. ‘We discussed diaries and Willie Maugham volunteered that mine, if I presented them, would be the most ...”

“... religion, sexual anxiety (or indeed helplessness), a heightened sensitivity to the complexities of class privilege and to the ruthless depredations of the economic system’, sensitivities he passed on to many of his characters. (Grace Melbury, in The Woodlanders, combines ‘modern nerves with primitive emotions’.)While Baudelaire’s ideal artist quickens ...”

“... that what we are struggling for? To be united, so as to be standing free.’ Led by the MPLA, the war against colonial dispossession had begun in 1961. When the Portuguese at last recognised defeat in 1975, the Salazar dictatorship and its generals having been driven to their knees by guerrilla courage and persistence, the Angolans had not become a single ...”

“... conscience; they may have admitted on occasions that there were things of genuine value in working-class culture; they may even have recognised that middle-class culture had its faults and upper-class culture its failings. But the fact remains that most of them preferred the opera to the ...”

“... generally a sympathetic biographer, suggests that the journal was ‘an expression of middle-class vanity’, the product of someone ‘with an unshakeable belief in his own historical destiny’. Cardew was by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to evaporate. His life ...”

“... are in fact committed to one of these things rather than another, to peace rather than war, or to irreligion rather than religion. But if we wish to argue about which if any of these things are necessarily socialist, ‘we had better yield the floor to the only truly great performer in that field, Plato.’ This is not to say that Schumpeter did ...”