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“... that there was nothing imaginary about the ghastliness of Stalinism – is insufficient. The Cold War was fought just as hard in France or Germany or England, but without the same grotesque paranoia or the chilling readiness to surrender liberty and believe the absurd. The enduring interest of this period is the light it throws, or fails to throw, on the ...”

“... and TV series, a marvellous post-colonial transformation was about to be wrought on a monochrome, war-weary nation. The docking of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948 did not herald the beginning of multiracial Britain, even if that myth has become entrenched in the wake of last year’s 50th-anniversary celebrations. Black people had lived here for ...”

“... in Rome on 13 June was the greatest spontaneous civic demonstration in the history of the post-war Italian Republic. In the European elections that followed immediately afterwards, the Italian electorate for the first time ever gave more votes to the Communists than to the Christian Democrats (33.3 per cent to 33 per cent). That many Italians cast their ...”

“... feudal remnants in Habsburg Hungary that Lukacs despised, not the cultivated bourgeoisie. To this class he himself belonged, even though he thought of himself as a member of the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’. The claim that he was ‘anti-bourgeois’ finds little support in this correspondence. His high-minded intellectual pursuits were all devoted to ...”

“... attended Liverpool University before and after his stint in the Navy during the Second World War. He got lecturing jobs at Newcastle and Reading; then chairs at Manchester, Bristol, London and Cambridge. Never one to miss an irony against himself, he remembers the double meaning lurking in the word ‘professor’: ‘what you have principally done to ...”

“... old when she first saw Pablo Escobar. It was 1972 and they were both living in Envigado, a working-class town half an hour south of Medellín in Colombia. Escobar was 23 and had a reputation as a ladies’ man: he would drive around on a Vespa wearing a white paisa poncho and cheap hair tonic. One day he noticed Henao in the street and started sending her ...”

“... What if Frank and Jane (Freilicher) are ‘paddling up and down the Essequibo/in our canoe of war-surplus gondola parts’? What if‘I’d give a lempira or twoto have it all slapped onto acanvas’ says Jane. ‘How likelazy flamingos look the floatingweeds! and the infundibuliformcorolla on our right’s a harmless Charybdis!’To surprise, to seize. A ...”

“... second round of the presidential election was an expression of the disrepute into which the ruling class has fallen, as well as of the temptation to xenophobia which can be found in various forms all over the world. The rejection of the proposed European constitution was an expression of the disillusionment with the EU project prevalent throughout the ...”

“... optimists’ belief that, after a rough and ready start, a more skilful and honest entrepreneurial class will take over from the present, rather shady lot, but he prefers the pessimists who believe that crime and corruption will continue to flourish. John Gray’s view, like Steele’s, is that Western attempts to ‘model the transition process of the ...”

“... Essays on Fiction (1983), that his own inadequacy as a mediator had been demonstrated. There was a war on, ‘and he who ventures into no-man’s-land brandishing cigarettes and singing carols must expect to be shot at.’ It was altogether a turning-point for him. Like St Jerome in Bethlehem, he retired to his study and applied himself to his Bible (the ...”

“... terms’, having to rely on the RUC Special Branch. And the RUC, not welcome in working-class nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry, was starved of intelligence-gathering opportunities. MI5 – preoccupied with ‘subversion’ from ‘domestic enemies’, and targeting such groups as the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), CND and ...”

“... art movement of the 20th century, appeared in Italy in the years before the First World War. Fascism, the original self-identified totalitarian political ideology, no less brashly expressive of modern times, emerged in Italy in the years immediately following the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without ...”

“... and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with ...”

“... an unearned income, not to become dependent on expensive domestic aids, which I knew most working-class women survived without. If I now feel critical of those attitudes as romantic and unrealistic it is because they remind me of a politics envisaged almost entirely in terms of my own conscience and peace of mind, which failed to take me towards other ...”

“... legislation when he was Prime Minister of the Cape; and he was directly responsible for the Boer War and all its repercussions, thanks to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. It is harder to calculate the long-term effects of his actions on the Matabele tribe, and the results of his colonisation north of the Zambezi. It is perhaps sufficient to observe that he ...”