“... 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 ...”

“... on Michael Mann, Norberto Bobbio, Roberto Unger, W.G. Runciman. Andreas Hillgruber, Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, Carlo Ginzburg, Isaiah Berlin, Fernand Braudel and Francis Fukuyama. More recently (LRB, 24 September and 22 October), he has extended himself to Michael Oakeshott and others of Oakeshott’s generation on ‘the intransigent right’, and to ...”

“... joined together in a larger whole, under a leader who can claim to speak for all of them, Labour may be finished as an electoral force. That, though, raises a bigger question. Is democratic micro-entanglement consistent with wanting to win elections? Glasman, along with almost every other contributor to this volume, assumes that Blue Labour is a way of ...”

“... can be a third explanation. If the misrepresentation of Edward Atiyah ever ceases, the credit may be due to a number of Israeli scholars who have spent years in their country’s archives attempting to discover and present the truth. Among them are Yehoshua Porath, professor of Middle East History at the Hebrew University, and several younger historians ...”

“... what appeared to be a coat in the water: when it was recovered it was found to be the mate, Ernest Perry, drenched in diesel and dead. Four more bodies were discovered in the wreck after it was salvaged a fortnight later. It was May before the two remaining members of the crew were washed up and identified. This is ...”

“... following suit. (‘Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides,’ Henry prays in his elegy for Ernest Hemingway of 1961). Among the great innovations of The Dream Songs is Berryman’s ability to reproduce on the page the slurring of consciousness and disintegration of language when subjected to such pressures. Take these lines from number ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after Michael Gold, an American communist acquaintance who was once told to go fuck himself by Ernest Hemingway, whom Gold had called out for class treachery). They moved to a spacious villa, which they furnished nicely. Kuczynski was now both the pleasant provincial wife of a municipal architect and a secret agent. Sorge was fond of fast ...”

“... 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 ...”