“... of these parties has been identified, in the orthodox Trotskyist genetics of ideas proposed by Ernest Mandel, as that which springs from the political inheritance of Karl Kautsky, the distinguished progenitor of a gradualist Marxism for the German Social Democrats of the period running from the Second International to the Twenties and Thirties. Kautsky’s ...”

“... from Holbein’s The Ambassadors – the broken lute, that open Luther – and top tips from Ernest Satow’s Diplomatic Practice (1917): at a party, try dropping ‘something meaty’ into an otherwise idle conversation; ‘the casual comment will later be fished out.’ Want to get the other side to propose something you can’t be seen to mention ...”

“... about Oxford’s fad for linguistic philosophy was shared by another of Nairn’s future mentors, Ernest Gellner, whose polemic Words and Things drew a connection between the insular preoccupations of the Oxford faculty and their cosy college life. Nairn was more interested in the Continental vigour of the ‘emperor of aesthetics’, Benedetto Croce, and won ...”

“... In his​ 1917 guide to diplomatic practice, Ernest Satow described a court ball held in London in 1768 at which a dispute over seating placements in the diplomatic box resulted in a duel between the Russian and French ambassadors. (The Russian ambassador came off worse, but survived.) The life of a diplomat is no longer assumed to feature the smell of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour ...”

“... falls’) is frivolity’s refusal to suffer. Even as she leaves her third husband, aptly named Ernest, Gilda, like Elyot Chase, insists that she is not serious. The battle in Coward’s best comedies is not between licence and control, but between gravity and high spirits. At least three times in Private Lives people shout at Elyot (Coward’s role) to be ...”

“... later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in 1930 he had the four Walker children, his ‘Swallows’, meet the two Billies, an ancient man and his elderly son, at work in the woods above their holiday lake. But ...”

“... a scent called Le Bouquet Favori de l’Impératrice. After the October Revolution, the parfumier Ernest Beaux relocated to France, met Coco Chanel and offered her an array of choices based on Le Bouquet Favori, from which she selected No. 5. Another parfumier, Auguste Michel, stayed in Russia, working for the TeZhe trust (an acronym for the unromantic State ...”

“... at any given time preferred their subjects to forget. Selective amnesia is not unique to Russia: Ernest Renan pointed out long ago that national memories are constituted as much by forgetting as by remembering. What is unusual is the sheer quantity and variety of dramatic and often bloody events in Russia’s past that historians, in accordance with the ...”

“... essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of Art in Elementary Schools’ (1884), which ‘may afterwards be modified, but never quite got rid of’. Familiarity with beautiful things could make poor families less likely to drink and gamble, he argued, because it would reveal ‘to many children who live in the crowded parts of large towns some of the ...”

“... Detroit and live high on the hog until a job goes wrong. Frank J. Ryan is a used-car salesman. Ernest Stickley is a petty criminal. They meet (or, more precisely, meet cute) when Stick tries to swipe a Camaro off Frank’s lot. A week later, Frank sees Stick again in a police line-up and decides he likes the cut of his jib. He tells the cops that Stick ...”

“... ciscenje, ‘ethnic cleansing’.* Unless civilisation intervenes, the newly-liberated nations may end up by replacing nascent democracy with forms of nationalist dictatorship like those prefigured in Gamsakhurdia’s Georgia or the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic. As for economics, the consequences can hardly be anything but intensified backwardness. This ...”

“... intransigent. One further thing I learned about the online court is that its name is misleading. I may have started my case online, but when Apple refused to mediate it was transferred to my local county court. This meant I had to pay a further ‘hearing fee’: these start at £25 and rise to more than £1000, depending on the value and complexity of the ...”

“... 1 January, Yorkshire. Ill over Christmas I say to Ernest Coultherd, a farmer in the village, that my Christmas dinner consisted of a poached egg. ‘Oh. Credit crunch, was it?’ Two dead salmon in the beck just above Mafeking Bridge, both of them huge creatures, nearly two feet long, so big that one wonders how the beck at low water can accommodate them, though there are a few deepish pools ...”

“... of ‘Marxist’. Marx’s works did not inform my youthful years – indeed, incredible as it may appear, I hardly heard of him while studying science, law, economics and history. Serious contact came only from a belated reading of his books, plus some correspondence with the author of Pour Marx, Louis Althusser. Attali comes from the old Jewish ...”

“... or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into question. Of course, there was a lot to debunk – and much, much more would come in the shape of ...”