“... Buruma. Although Garton Ash finds himself longing for Mrs Thatcher in Yugoslavia, it is the German Chancellor who receives the most abundant accolades. ‘Helmut Kohl is the most formidable politician – and statesman – in Europe. He will not lightly be deflected from the last great task he has set himself,’ he writes. ‘As the 20th century draws to its ...”

“... a saga of American traditions, in which he sought to explore the values of the age through Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant, who are attended by a chauvinist, Basil Ransom. ‘The whole generation is womanised,’ Ransom says. ‘The masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of ...”

“... radical thinkers since Freud – Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Achille Mbembe, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Butler – have seen psychoanalysis as a tool for a more general, social liberation: from the psychically disfiguring systems of fascism, capitalism, colonialism, racism ...”

“... a score of members sitting in the newly independent Algerian parliament; Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French ...”

“... read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff proposes that the foxy Berlin always harboured the wish to metamorphose into a hedgehog. All I know is ...”