“... 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 ...”

“... the fact that fewer than a quarter of historians in France work on the history of other countries may help explain Burguière’s restricted field of vision. Bloch and Febvre had many international connections and shared a broad, cosmopolitan vision. Bloch himself declared that historians should ‘base their plan, the treatment of the problems they ...”

“... extorted concessions from the British by brandishing Cold War threats of communist expansion. As Ernest Bevin said when he was foreign secretary, ‘Our support of nationalism in South and South-East Asia provides the best possible counter to communist subversion and penetration.’ Merdeka – independence – was finally granted in 1957, well before the ...”

“... for example, once dreamed the whole of Impressionism. As Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in May 1888, When good père Corot said a few days before he died: last night I saw in my dreams landscapes with entirely pink skies, well, didn’t they come, those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain, in Impressionist landscapes? All this is to say ...”

“... bars’ in many British clubs and dance halls during the war, ‘however convenient it may have been to blame white Americans for the[ir] introduction’. The Casino dance hall in Warrington was forced to shutter its doors after its manager refused to bar coloured servicemen from the club, as requested to by a US army officer. Shortly before the ...”

“... and free trade – Thatcherism avant la lettre. Urquhart’s view was mirrored 150 years later by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world ...”

“... shifting social forces, the Enlightenment could be no more than an expression of that movement: in Ernest Labrousse’s awesome phrase, ‘la prise de conscience bourgeoise’. The Philosophes were correspondingly relegated to the role of window-dressers for the ascendant power of the bourgeoisie. One of the many satisfying results of Robert Darnton’s ...”

“... time. Later it was deplored by such differing authorities as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin. The transformation of Russia into a Soviet Empire ranks, I suppose, as the most significant change caused by the First World War. The enthusiasms which the war generated at first faded before the war ended. There was much talk of its being a war to ...”

“... Pritchard elucidates in this characteristically direct, helpful, teacherly summary: ‘The phrase may accommodate either an underlining of “sound” or of “sense”, thereby setting up a playful shuttling between the poem as communicating something, some grain of wisdom or truth about the world (the sound of sense), and the poem as wholly embodying that ...”

“... become popular in Britain in a cheap edition published in 1887 by one of his socialist admirers, Ernest Rhys. ‘The priest departs, the divine Literatus comes.’ Whitman’s conception of the role of the poet in relation to 19th-century American culture contrasts vividly with the indifference with which his own productions were received, even those most ...”

“... force to deliver the bomb. Dalton and Cripps attempted a rearguard action against it in 1946, but Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, would have none of it. Smarting from the way he’d just been talked down to in Washington, Bevin insisted that being taken seriously by the US now depended on having the bomb: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over ...”

“... meeting, known as ‘speaker’ and ‘participation’. In one you must listen, in the other you may talk. The form of discourse in participation groups is distinctive. Dialogue (in AA-speak, ‘cross-talk’) is proscribed. You don’t address your fellow alcoholics, you ‘share’. It looks to the outsider like a seminar discussion but isn’t; it’s a ...”

“... and the Oulipo’, Mathews gives an account of a befuddled ethnolinguist called Ernest Botherby who, encountering two undiscovered New Guinean tribes, tried to explain to one the existence of the other. He was hindered by the fact that the language of each tribe contained only three words, which could be used to express only a single ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by debate. Each man chose a team, with an eye on victory. Schapiro’s team, which consisted of Ernest Nagel, the philosopher of science at Columbia, and A.J. Ayer, represented positivism de pur sang. In addition to these painstaking analyses, the essay contains the suggestion that the most fruitful way of looking at any theory of unity is to regard it, not ...”