“... may be under consideration in the deeper recesses of Washington. At any rate, now that the Cold War has ended the Americans can no longer denounce their critics to the South as the puppets of Moscow. The gadarene rush from the countryside to Caracas in the 1970s, followed by the economic stagnation and unemployment of the 1980s, led to social breakdown in ...”

“... the book is now almost forgotten, but it was one of the greatest cultural sensations of the Cold War era. Before it was printed, it was trailed in magazines, and immediately shot onto the American bestseller lists, where it stayed for months, grabbing the attention and occupying the energies of both enthusiasts and enraged critics. The brouhaha subsided ...”

“... But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... summers, but with ‘no permanence . . . no roots’; it might also be described as love in a Cold War climate. The earlier part involved Brittany, a large family house at Saint-Briac, and Berlin, where his father served as US Attorney. Kerry was the cosmopolitan, French-speaking child of high-hoping Americans, and he still gives the impression of being ...”

“... the word ‘honour’ catches the eye.In fact, he had been taken prisoner and for the rest of the war was held in German camps, from which he escaped five times, his awkward height always leading to his recapture. Despite this heroic record, he greeted the armistice in low spirits, writing to his colonel that ‘the great joy I share with you is mixed for ...”

“... a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities ...”

“... is about aspiration, and about the ways in which Britain has and hasn’t changed. A working-class Catholic born in Liverpool in 1954, who became a driven and brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a ...”

“... and 1818 the British authorities in Van Diemen’s Land engaged ‘in what amounted to a civil war’ with Howe and his bushrangers. When bounty-hunters killed him outside his bark hut in 1818 (decapitating the corpse, in accordance with the gruesome protocols of the day) he was dressed from head to foot in kangaroo skins. A contemporary tells us: In his ...”

“... late 19th-century England: in the world Haggard created the governing principle was survival, not class or intellect, and the rewards for bravery were blood (other people’s) and diamonds. Graham Greene said that he valued Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter ...”

“... The opening is subtitled ‘January 1981’, somewhere towards the end of Argentina’s Dirty War, so it’s reasonable to assume that the dangers hinted at are crimes of dictatorship, the same crimes that have been censored out of the newspaper Juan picks up that morning in a breakfast diner: ‘There were no articles about clandestine detention centres ...”

“... Vendler’s Chamber of Horrors’, French theory, and ‘the deformed, uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism’. It opposes them, much less specifically, with what would appear a libertarian, childlike, very late Romantic poetry of ‘the body’, ‘the voice’ and ‘the new recklessness’. The ideals are ...”

“... peasantry with the status of landed gentry’, lording it over the blacks. The Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 put an end to this idyll, robbing the Boers of their independence and their control of the Tranvaal’s gold. In the aftermath, an Afrikaner underclass came into being, desperately poor, often landless, stricken by fantasies of paradise ...”

“... turbulent period. And no book has done more to illuminate the outlook of the 17th-century ruling class. Pocock showed its insular preoccupation with the common law and the ancient constitution, with the medieval language of custom and precedent, and thus explained its inability to understand the events that plunged it into civil ...”

“... future that penetrates our present carries, rather, a sense of end-of-history exhaustion. The Cold War promise of apocalypse has been kicked away only to uncover rampant nationalism and what Robert Lowell called ‘small war on the heels of small war’. Our destiny seems to lurk in ...”

“... During the war Anna Kavan worked for nearly two years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies ...”