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“... through from outside. He took grim satisfaction from France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which he blamed on the incompetence of the chiefs of staff. He deplored the bribery and ballot-rigging which made a mockery of the new ‘democratic’ elections, and stood firm, but alone, against the forces of reaction. He also had misfortune to ...”

“... west of Chelmsford. There he and his family remained, heads down, for the duration of the Civil War. Following a similar logic, a three-storey-deep indestructible bunker was built between 1952 and 1953 at Kelvedon Hatch, where it remained in readiness throughout the most heated episodes of the Cold War. From 1961 it was a ...”

“... Rubin, went to Radcliffe College when she was 16, ‘one of three Jewish women in her freshman class’, Robins says, ‘and the only one to admit being so’. She met Lionel Trilling in 1927 and married him two years later. She had hopes of being a singer, but two thyroid operations wrecked her vocal cords, and she turned to writing. She wrote a regular ...”

“... writings, which introduced Herzen to Anglo-American readers, he came to resemble a pragmatic Cold War liberal rather than a revolutionary socialist. Berlin’s portrait (or self-portrait) has stood largely unaltered for more than half a century. Herzen’s work has not had consistent backing inside or outside academia, on the left or on the right, and Aileen ...”

“... of Eastern Europe, preparing for a research trip to East Berlin while grieving for his working-class communist father, is grazed by a car on Abbey Road. He is involved with a glamorous young art student called Jennifer Moreau, whom he took to his father’s funeral a few weeks before, and who has shown up with a stepladder so that they can re-create the ...”

“... has been an English Chekhov. That mocking analyst of the historical failure and inertia of his own class was turned, in the English theatre, into a charming chronicler of whimsicality and eccentricity. This analytic and teaching dramatist is detached from his specific intelligence and viewpoint, and is then all tough talk and open stagecraft. In one ...”

“... affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and could not devote themselves to the intricacies of 30 April-2 May ...”

“... only a malign fate – the totalitarian grip of Russia – wrested them after the Second World War, as the ideologues of Central Europe, Kundera and others, have argued. The division of the continent has deeper roots, and goes back much further, than the pact at Yalta. In a well-received book, the American historian Larry Wolff charged travellers and ...”

“... to charge a number of Communists with conspiracy. A wave of propaganda convinced many middle-class Germans that the emergency decree was justified. During the blaze, the police found a young Dutchman called Marinus van der Lubbe in the building. He had firelighters in his possession and other suspicious material. By the time he was brought to trial ...”

“... laws, courts and union regulations that people obey. How can we do it? How do you get from World War Two to Maastricht and the EU?’ Europeans don’t understand that this is an astonishing historical precedent. In a recent essay you call for a ‘social democracy of fear’. But hasn’t the ‘war on terror’ of the ...”

“... The Red and the Black. The hero is a Radical of independent mind. He comes from the lower middle class, is poor, indifferent to his dress, often proudly contemptuous in his manner, and ambitious, not for himself but for humanity or, more accurately, for the small part of it he knows. He wants them all and particularly Esther Lyon to be better than they ...”

“... largest country by landmass, and has the ninth largest economy – who grew up not just working-class but poor. His biographer John French points out that Lula learned to read when he was ten, didn’t always have enough to eat, left school at twelve, and came from the impoverished, stigmatised north-east of the country, with the accent to prove it. ...”

“... reverse the priorities established by the international community as it emerged from World War Two, when the idea was that the economy and the world of finance should serve and not dominate humanity. The Philadelphia Declaration (which became an integral part of the constitution of the ILO) proclaims the right of all ‘to pursue both their material ...”

“... In 2001, the New-York-based International Rescue Committee started providing estimates of war-related deaths since the conflict began in 1998: they rose from 1.7 million in 2001 to 5.4 million in January 2008. If correct, these figures account for about 8 per cent of the current population of the country. They were called into question in ...”

“... continues right up to the present. Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries’ which responded favourably to the ‘left-leaning rhetoric of the Modern school’. But before this momentary engagement with the question of public housing disrupts his art-historical ...”