“... he backs off furiously. Hester Prynne, Clarissa, Tess, Anna Karenina – life is indifferent to class when it comes to trapping us in stories. Still, as Tess complains to her mother, ‘ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.’ The poor have no choice but to end up in novels because they do not read ...”

“... and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth ...”

“... forerunner of Guevara.By the standards of the time, Guevara had a fairly conventional upper-middle-class upbringing. His childhood, like his short adult life, was dominated by his asthma. His parents were obliged to move, largely for his sake, from the semi-tropical lowlands of Misiones to Alta Gracia, on the lower slopes of the Andes above Córdoba. Guevara ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the piano, two Trojan horses that brought the arts into the hitherto philistine middle-class European home. Johnson’s anecdotes and even his jokes conform to journalistic propriety. They aren’t there just for colour or to display the community’s diversity, but are targeted as in a newspaper on the private lives and hidden weaknesses of public ...”

“... 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 ...”