“... acknowledged a double heritage: ‘Our interpretation of history will be both materialist with Marx and mystical with Michelet.’ Jules Michelet wrote one of the first major accounts of the revolution, which appeared between 1847 and 1853. Marxist historians would later dismiss it as ‘lyrical’, ‘petty bourgeois’, light on the state action that ...”

“... may at first seem very distant, even diametrically opposed, to the work that first made his name, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). The Guardian’s obituary for Cohen, which described him as ‘arguably the leading political philosopher of the left’, called the book a ‘revolutionary reinterpretation of Marxist theory’. In fact ...”

“... here as an un-Irish activity. Denis Donoghue’s refusal to assist the work adds a dislike of Marx to his dislike of Freud. ‘It is easy to denounce the Christian Brothers’ to whom he listened to at school ‘for teaching a dangerous version of Irish history, and to point to the renewed violence in Northern Ireland since 1968 as the inevitable ...”

“... uprisings of 1989 seemed to bear out her thesis that revolution in its essence is not social (as Marx thought) but political, and that true political power flows only from below, from a people spontaneously acting in concert. Apart from her study of totalitarianism, Arendt’s fame rests on three books. In The Human Condition (1958), an account of the ...”

“... such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography have been persuaded to contribute an epitome here ...”

“... new laws on the bosses, if they tried to turn nasty.‘Rubbish!’ Souvarine repeated. ‘Your Karl Marx still believes in letting natural forces take their course. No politics, no conspiracies, am I right? Everything out in the open, and nothing to fight for but wage rises … To hell with you and your gradual evolution! Set fire to every town and ...”

“... by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the ...”

“... as early as 1833 were calling ‘the annihilation of space by time’, 25 years before Karl Marx used the phrase in the Grundrisse. Along with the speed of the trains was the shock of the speed with which the railways spread, gouging cuttings out of hills, flinging embankments across bowls of land, boring and blasting tunnels through solid ...”

“... to adhere to a fixed platform, but her biographers are too deferential to ideological slots, from Marx to Freud, to sympathise with her independence of mind. Another problem of this biography is that it does not pick out the prophetic strain embedded in its collection of detail. Everyone who met Schreiner was rapt by her rhetoric Celebrities like Keir Hardie ...”

“... through, to the logic of monetary exchange – and the nature of capitalism and class struggle. Marx now had a folder to himself, as did Fourier and Saint-Simon. There were new dossiers on the Stock Exchange, the Working-Class Movement, Professional Revolutionaries, the Commune, the materialist anthropology (and zoology) of the first Socialist Sects. The ...”

“... She had learned that method in Germany, in the Twenties. Husserl, Weber, Heidegger and, latterly, Karl Jaspers were her inspiration. The universities of South-Wes-tern Germany, which had had such an extraordinarily fertile period in the 1890s, formed the mind of Hannah Arendt. She worked, curiously enough, on theology. Her dissertation concerned the concept ...”

“... teacher Georg Simmel). At that stage the manuscript probably still lacked its apostrophes to Marx. By 1924 and the first publication of the essay ‘On the Mathematical and the Dialectical Character of Music’, Bloch had evolved his idiosyncratic version of Marxism, and Klemperer was joyfully fulfilling the first of his major conducting engagements in ...”

“... a pressure cooker. Yet the prominence of certain names – Heine, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Ricardo, Marx, Disraeli – and the flourishing milieu of wealthy educated Jews in a few favoured cities, notably Berlin, should not mislead us. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars the great bulk of Ashkenazi Jews remained unintegrated in gentile society, in Germany as much ...”

“... was to resist commerce. Their philosophy, like that of many Freegans, is a sweet-sounding blend of Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, with quite a bit of Tolstoy and Gandhi thrown in. Not using money means that they pick up food from bins: they have regular haunts, up and down the country, and they visit them when travelling around to give out leaflets. ‘We ...”

“... Marianne Weber’s circle preserved the memory of Max (Elias gave a paper at her ‘salon’). Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith were beginning to work through the Weberian legacy, and Heidelberg was home also to a young American called Talcott Parsons, who later presented his own straitjacketed, functionalist version of ...”