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“... he misleadingly presented as a portrait of his own times. In Hobsbawm’s words: ‘Marx and Engels did not describe the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it.’ What exactly is the ‘universal interdependence of nations’ that Marx allegedly ...”

“... Poor in deeds and rich in thoughts’ – that was Friedrich Hölderlin’s lament about his fellow Germans two hundred years ago. In one form or another the idea became familiar. Germany in the 19th century acquired a reputation as the land of poets and thinkers (the phrase was coined by Jean Paul), something that foreign observers viewed with a mixture of condescension and respect ...”

“... from capitalism to socialism as a scientific certainty, and worked closely with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow on the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. Under his aegis, the Institute amassed a unique archive of labour and socialist history, and produced two classics of Marxist economic analysis: Henryk Grossmann’s ...”

“... lecture or other.’ It was at the age of 15 that he read a book – the first in his life. It was Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family, of Private Property and the State. Joe’s self-education raised him from his peasant origins to a sense of himself as an intellectually aware member of the industrial proletariat. Muriel’s education was a ...”

“... than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the Kaiser, his paternal great-uncle, Friedrich Adolf Sorge, knew Marx and Engels, and had served as Secretary-General of the First International when it moved to New York in the 1870s. Both Sorge and Philby enjoyed privileged educations which turned them, at least ...”

“... one another.’ Secular socialists remarkably accused Malthus of immorality as well as error: Engels condemned his work as a ‘repulsive blasphemy against man and nature’; Marx accounted it ‘a sin against science’ and a ‘libel on the human race’ – little more than an apology by a ‘parson of the English State Church’ for his own class ...”

“... examination in a book of this length. Garff dutifully mentions Kierkegaard’s disappointment with Friedrich Schelling’s lectures in 1841, but does not go into detail beyond recycling the story that Marx was in the audience as well. (Engels was certainly there, but Marx, as it happens, was not.) Nor does he make anything ...”

“... and Hero Worship and Past and Present (its condemnation of the modern cash nexus eagerly read by Engels and taken up by Marx), and produced an annotated edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches that redeemed Cromwell’s reputation. By middle age the vigour of his early style and the optimism of his early tone had largely given way to vitriol and ...”