“... right to the end. The end came on 19 July 1979 when the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional took over the government of Nicaragua. The class struggle nonetheless continues – but where? Obviously, in military clashes with the counter-revolutionary and Honduran forces trained and financed by the US Government. But what of the internal front? In the ...”

“... of the lack is that Gulliver was forbidden by the Emperor of Blefuscu to bring any away, though he took with him some tiny sheep and cattle, which he was able to show to ‘many Persons of Quality’ for ‘a considerable Profit’, as well as to sell and breed successfully in England. That these were therefore ‘seen’ is part of the authenticating tease ...”

“... a ‘studio event’ implying for her a piece of improvised theatre. Quasi-theatrical events took place in Rembrandt’s studio and he is said to have urged his pupils to perform roles in order to devise poses. One may also feel that there is something ‘stagey’ about some of his early self-portraits and about some of his early action-filled paintings ...”

“... uses every available one to allow us to glimpse a life of companionship of the kind to which John Milton aspired in a scholar’s marriage: his wife’s chamber was placed next to his study in the house which he most frequently occupied, ‘a proximity’, MacCulloch says, ‘which not all scholars have welcomed in their ...”

“... it is just such a change that Unger is imagining. In short, the world that would result if we took Unger’s advice would be one in which the very problems he cares about would get worse and in which other items that are not at the centre of his agenda, such as political liberty, would end up in a disastrous condition. Unger doesn’t even try to imagine ...”

“... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...”

“... our knowledge of Nature is always socially mediated. This is one of several issues which divide John Rees, who has written an erudite, illuminating introduction to this book, and Slavoj Žižek, who has provided a characteristically provocative ‘postface’ for it. Roughly speaking, Rees seeks rather stiffly to reclaim Lukács for a certain Marxist ...”

“... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...”

“... then registers his many failures to honour those vows. He notes benefits given and received (‘I took Mr Townsend and Isackson to the next door, a tavern, and did spend 5s on them’), and is sensitive to imbalances between the two. Affairs of the heart are not isolated from the reciprocal rhythms of receipt and payment: the day after Diana Crisp ‘denied ...”

“... the street: ‘There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anyone else understands.’ John Locke, then a political refugee in the Netherlands, simply couldn’t master the mathematics, though this didn’t stop him reviewing the book in the Dutch press. He was glad to be reassured by a local expert that he could take the sums and proofs on ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... two heroes stand marooned in their Beatness on that sunlit hill, ‘a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back and blushed ... we would stick together and be buddies till we died.’ Spelling out the significance of this for the legend, Campbell notes that ‘theirs is a platonic love, though bedecked by romantic ...”

“... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...”

“... with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in his nepotism, happily had ...”

“... proved attractive to the Latin American countries in its sphere of influence. Britain and France took a different path. They repudiated Montesquieu and concentrated power in a single elected assembly, rejecting constitutional review by a supreme court and subordinating presidents and second chambers to cabinet rule, with the support of the House of Commons ...”