“... probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly with the steeper philosophical faces. The perspective itself is questionable, however. Without objecting for a moment to the ...”

“... the new 19th-century pattern of industrialisation and urban growth. In the earlier volume Michael Anderson showed from a study of Preston in 1851 how this occurred. Early marriage was made possible by the new job structure, and the disappearance of family-based economic activity allowed the young to stay at home longer: meanwhile the lure of urban work ...”

“... modernity had been produced in the same country, in Gutenberg’s workshop in Mainz. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, print was the precondition of all modern ‘imagined communities’. Now it would give rise to the most widely-read book of the modern epoch, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of February 1848. And from that sprang the imaginary ...”

“... hacking at the News of the World collapsed. On 20 June, a few months after Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, News International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined ...”

“... from a loose identification with the Workers’ Party to becoming a behind-the-scenes adviser to David Trimble in his brave attempt to bring Unionism to the middle ground of power-sharing with a domesticated Sinn Féin. Bew is allegedly the originator of the pithy identification of Trimble’s desired power base as ‘the Prod in the garden centre’; the ...”

“... I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed ...”

“... when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies’, David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno’s father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on ...”

“... that she be given a non-custodial sentence, so it came as a shock when, on 5 March 2018, Sheriff David Pender jailed her for sixteen months.Katie’s childhood had been as stable as William’s was volatile. She and her younger brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... Mythology of the Secret Societies (1972) illuminated much, but not the movement’s origins. Now David Stevenson can claim to have clarified these considerably, in a work of creative scholarship flavoured by exceptional candour and gusto. His subtitle gives his gist. In the 17th century, such characteristic features of Freemasonry as the local Lodge ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... version of the slower colonial evolutions towards national consciousness plotted by Benedict Anderson. How the territory was denied independence is a story Wrong tells very well. Much had to do with Emperor Haile Selassie, the way he positioned himself and the presence he achieved, both in the West and (despite his enemies on the continent) in Africa. He ...”