“... Lessing; married Roger Marks; and seeing no reason why she now had to share a name with Jenny Marx, Karl Marx’s sad and stoical wife, took advantage of the fact that Rogajinsky was a name in Roger’s family and became Jenny Diski, wife of Roger Diski. It was neat, it made sense. And it suited her well....”

“... vide Back to Methuselah. What a dreadful prospect, by the way. I cannot let the centenary of Karl Marx’s death pass without notice. He is by no means forgotten. The Communist Manifesto sells more copies than it did in his lifetime, particularly in the United States. I know. I wrote an introduction to the Penguin edition of the Manifesto in 1967 ...”

“... and the body itself dissolved. The local Fascist High Command took possession of the ‘Karl Marx’ centre. After that the Railwaymens’ Club in Via Risalta was occupied, and the editorial and printing premises of the communist organ L’Ordine Nuovo[Gramsci’s paper] were set fire to and destroyed. The Turin industrialists themselves were ...”

“... landlord is a 58-year-old individual, with a median income (not including rent) of £24,000. Karl Marx and Adam Smith once agreed that almost everybody’s interests – workers, industrialists, governments – were aligned against landlords. Yet today most of us, even those of us who rent, are no more than a few degrees of separation away from a ...”

“... I was a fairly tremulous secretary of the Oxford University Labour Club. He’d agreed to talk on Marx, and to be given dinner at the Union beforehand, and he was the very picture of patient, non-condescending charm. Uncomplainingly eating the terrible food we offered him, he awarded imaginary Marx marks to the old ...”

“... to Alan Reeve, a murderer currently on the run from Broadmoor, a borstal boy at 13, a reader of Marx and Lenin in prison, like Abbott. Reeve told his interviewer about an unhappy childhood, and explained: ‘Barry Jackson died as a surrogate for all those I perceived as my enemies.’ But not many people would like to live in a country where attentions of ...”

“... to do intellectual work is something I’ve known only from hearsay,’ she wrote to her mentor Karl Jaspers in 1945, after years in which each of them had believed the other dead. ‘I’ve become a kind of freelance writer, something between a historian and a political journalist.’ She had published her first Partisan Review piece – about Kafka ...”

“... his interest in Classical Antiquity, in Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and in Hölderlin, Hegel and Marx, and in James Hogg, is imparted to the young ones. He is the sort of Sixties dominie who keeps saying ‘fuck’ in class and inveighing against the system. His relationship with the kids is one between equals, but they also seem to expect him to be a wise ...”

“... new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists. But the implication is that there has been ...”

“... ones that saw it as an imitation of social conditions. Even sociologists of knowledge such as Karl Mannheim struggled mightily to get beyond the relativism implicit in their stress on the situatedness of ideologies (Mannheim’s solution, which he called ‘relationism’, involved the harmonising of the complementary perspectives of intellectuals from ...”

“... of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Benjamin was not wholly sceptical of the future, as Fredric Jameson points out in this monumental study. On the contrary, he discerned in it a messianic power to disrupt the present. Even so, he ...”

“... conscious when they were young. Ronald Fraser’s book arranges a marriage between Freud and Marx. One law for the rich and another for the poor, as the two systems can be made to seem, are laid down together in a book which commemorates a desertion of the rich for the poor. He had hit on the ‘aim of combining two different modes of enquiry – oral ...”

“... must. The attractive publication, briefly and informatively introduced, of the scripts* of several Marx Brothers films – Monkey Business (1931), Duck Soup (1933) and A Day at the Races (1937) – is a sublime invitation to stop and think about our swings of convulsiveness and weariness in the face of these films; to sense that it is essential to the ...”

“... Karl Popper is perhaps the only living philosopher of science who has had a substantial influence on the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might be made for Thomas Kuhn. However, Kuhn seems to me a perceptive sociologist of science, but a poor philosopher. Also, in so far as he has had an effect on the way scientists behave, it has been pernicious: to be a great scientist, according to Kuhn, you must do revolutionary science, and the best evidence that you are doing it is that you are so obscure and inconsistent in your statements as to be wholly incomprehensible to others ...”

“... for the nastier things he does when he’s not being a philanthropist. His teacher and mentor, Karl Popper, might have seen this as an example of the paradox of unintended consequences. Soros’s actions also illustrate one of the central puzzles of Popper’s liberalism. Like Soros, Popper wanted to have it both ways: he wanted to unify the humanitarian ...”