“... and straightening was given stronger expression in Marx’s prediction that the eradication of class differences and hierarchical power relations would bring the close of history; and there were many who, like Benjamin, rejected the prospect of endless progress in favour of an egalitarian ending. But Marx offered hope for the present rather than the ...”

“... Christopher’s sisters married a tailor, a shoemaker and a glover. This tough, industrious class nurtured much of the budding literary talent of the time: the Elizabethan leather industry provided a livelihood, not only for Marlowe’s family, but also for that of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, sons respectively of a Norwich saddler and a ...”

“... living conditions of the less privileged orders of society. Cicero’s presentation of Roman upper-class etiquette as a code of moral duly ran counter to romanticism and individualism. His avowed indebtedness to the thinkers of ancient Greece, to Plato and Aristotle and the philosophers of his own youth, fell foul of the new cult of originality and the new ...”

“... forfeited funds. We’re nicer, but we’re not One Nation yet. Nevertheless, the undeclared civil war of the last six years seems to have had its effect. In 1981, the only poll that got anywhere near reflecting what actually happened in the Warrington by-election was taken in haste outside the local vodka factory, and it would not be wise to put too much ...”

“... and with the Conquistadores. Contemporary America has no such vital connection with its Civil War, or with its Puritan foundation. Fuentes suggests that the Americans have lost their past by virtue of ancestral sexual timidity. The conquerors of America (unlike those of Mexico) killed, but they did not sufficiently rape. The result was genocide, not ...”

“... explicit political involvement. The suspicion seems to be deeper when it comes to anti-Vietnam war poets such as Bly and Levertov: Pound gets off relatively lightly. Sifting out the good, lyrical bits of the Cantos from the bad, political bits is no way to come properly to terms with Pound’s poetry. The desire ‘to dream the Republic’ is central to ...”

“... secret data. At the same time he was educating himself in the disagreeable facts of America’s War on Terror, and the moral and legal implications of the national security state. He was pressed by larger doubts the more he learned. Not all these particulars emerged in the interview, but all could be inferred; and Snowden’s profile differed from that of ...”

“... between the family members might be a fiction, and that Joseph Skizzen himself might be a Nazi war criminal. Skizzen has been lying about his age for most of his life, and near the book’s end we are told that he has the option ‘to forget the order he had been given by the High Command’. The line can be understood as making a mocking reference to an ...”

“... rates both before and after the Revolution. The suicide rate seems to have dropped during the war years between 1914 and 1921, though in the absence of systematic monitoring, one can’t be sure. But in the 1920s the experts resumed their work, now with more secure professional status and support from the modernising Soviet state, which in its early years ...”

“... less obviously, on weaponising the economy to secure political power: a combination of culture war, patronage and mass clientelism. The specificity of these characteristics tends to be missed by those who equate contemporary right-wing populism with fascism, or see populism as a new ideology, or assume that ‘ordinary people’ brought all this on ...”

“... and doomed, had to lose. ‘The modern men won,’ the new men like Sherman, advocate of ‘total war’ (the theme that the Civil War is the prototype of later global wars is also a favourite of Warren’s), so different from the gallant Southern generals who led their own troops in person. There is more than a whiff here ...”

“... Bertrand Russell, who was lecturing in America, found himself trapped there by the outbreak of war. His situation was made worse because of his publicly expressed views on sex and marriage: for instance, the proposition, in Marriage and Morals, that ‘the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in ...”

“... had said: ‘The opposition to the Georgians was already at the time in question (just after the war) Sitwellism. But the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.’ This Osbert hated. His anti-Georgian blasts, his own ‘let us be witty’ satiric verses, Edith’s experiments with ‘image-patterns based, like nursery rhymes, on ...”

“... the general staff of the Conservative Party. The Tories used to be fond of saying that the idea of class struggle was old hat. Believe that, sir, and you’ll be ready to credit any damned thing. Even before Thatcher carried the vote of no confidence in Callaghan, she had commissioned her friend Nicholas Ridley to design a campaign of revenge on the ...”

“... but there is little evidence that they were. It is the twenty-odd years before the First World War that most catch the eye. This was when the Apostles were something like a recruiting agency for what we loosely call Bloomsbury, but what we ought perhaps to acknowledge as a cultural-cum-political formation of an entirely novel sort. Setting the intellectual ...”