Search Results

“... young Scottish sectarian thug: he is an impoverished, disaffected, prospectless victim of a wider class battle. The fissiparous nature of Ulster Protestant militias – ‘UDA, UVF, UFF, UR’, as Rebus reels them off – doesn’t stop the excluded hooligan’s yearning to find in them a galvanising identity. Having a side in a fight is what ...”

“... whole novel right there.) In 1950, one pair of ladies’ white knickers (‘retrieved from the 3rd Class Compartment’) and a lot of handbags. On Christmas Eve 1955, a person left their false teeth on the 10.30 train to northern parts, but thankfully only ‘the upper set’. The 1960s got off to a good start with the loss of a ‘pair of dancing ...”

“... Setting his face against the IMF and World Bank, Erwin argued that the SACP, ‘representing class interests on the basis of socialist theory’, should struggle for a Reconstruction Accord, enshrining a radical process of redistribution which ‘must go beyond’ such timid ideas as wealth taxes, progressive taxation and sweeping land reform to more ...”

“... that he conceived and named the policy of containment pursued by the United States during the Cold War. It was, he said, ‘designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world’. The policy was set out in a 5000-word telegram he sent from Moscow ...”

“... to make peace with them. Based on essays which appeared in the New Yorker this summer, The Longest War has the advantage of immediacy, of intimacy. The anguish it describes, an anguish located in the first-person plural employed almost throughout, has not been tempered by time. Written in the form of a journal, The Longest ...”

“... Stalin’s anti-semitic campaign (‘rootless cosmopolitans’) after the end of the Second World War. At the very end of his life, Stalin turned his mind once again to the ever-irritating Jewish Question. He planned to unmask yet another great conspiracy engineered, of course, by ‘Joint’, the sinister Jewish organisation which masterminded foreign ...”

“... two decades Japan piled up annual growth rates of 10 per cent and more and produced world-class steel, electronics and cars, financed entirely by domestic savings, without a penny of foreign capital – thereby flatly contradicting the current IMF dogma that global financial markets are the key to rapid growth. Forced to rely on energy imports, Japan ...”

“... weapons have been hard to come by. Instead, their very power has constrained their use. War has always been destructive for the losers. It’s sometimes destructive for the victors too: the Soviet Union lost 13 per cent of its population in the Second World War. But until the invention of nuclear weapons, victory ...”

“... through and 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 ...”

“... incredible that it simply has to be taken seriously,’ he noted in July 1939). On the eve of the war he wrote: Sat on a bench in Leicester Square gardens, realising that I have definitely ‘been called’ to be one of those who are to announce the true underlying event that is taking place during this century; aware of being perhaps the only human being ...”

“... more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s useful and unpretentious book on the ...”

“... passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion. Ambushes turned the highway into a death trap until the victorious Taliban swept into Kabul in September 1996, eliminating all security problems once again. The only threat when I travelled the highway a few weeks later was ...”

“... socialist society ... was essentially built’ in which ‘the alliance of the working class and the peasantry was placed on a solid socio-economic footing,’ ‘ethnic conflicts became a thing of the past’ and ‘Marxist-Leninist ideology became dominant in the minds of the Soviet people.’ ‘History,’ the document said, ‘has not known ...”

“... of Sarah Worth. Here she is warning her daughter, who has just gone to Oxford, about the upper-class English: ‘People (which I see only in the dentist’s office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the National Enquirer (which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of the young ...”

“... is a wanderer and an obsessive: it’s this which sets up the resonance between the upper-middle-class Englishman and the Patagonians, Australians and nomads whose company he keeps. If he wasn’t the narrator of his books he could easily be one of the people the narrator meets. Consider the way he began his travels: When I was in my twenties ... I had a ...”