“... preface, as the singular work that elaborated the ‘fundamental principles of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working ...”

“... be terrible in strictly human ways, and, in pursuit of that, that a decent novel can animate class differences without seeming to be a fan of them. This was instinctive for Isherwood, and works its way out in his books as dramatic empathy and a calm inclusivity of style. You can tell he would be a generous friend just by reading his sentences. To be the ...”

“... to support Kerensky’s doomed government and its commitment to staying in the First World War.Russian populism, as Chris Ely points out in his new history, was concerned with more than revolutionary aspirations or a rhetorical emphasis on ‘the people’. Its origins lay in the enormous cultural gulf that had emerged in Russia after the reforms of ...”

“... the Edinburgh Festival, religion, childhood, Marxism, bicycles, and the Army in the Second World War. The ‘Notes on Authors’ give a range of ages, occupations and habitations. The stories are so arranged as to bring forward analogies of subject that focus in several instances considerable differences of treatment. Oliver Sacks’s stirring ‘The ...”

“... shock. During the 1970s several thousand Chinese technicians built the world’s biggest post-war railway between Tanzania and Zambia. The achievement is not nullified by niggling later criticisms of embankments being too narrow or locomotives too weak, but it has to be qualified by the enormous difficulty China had in creating a corps of Africans capable ...”

“... have been a portrait into a long obeisance. When Pinter writes a truly dire poem about the Gulf War, the sort of rant you would have to turn down for the school magazine, and which was refused by the Independent, the Observer, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and (surely not) the London Review of Books, Billington not only prints and defends the ...”

“... eruption of youthful insubordination in 1968 seemed to go beyond barriers of language, culture and class. Today, almost thirty years later, one is struck not only by the homogeneity of the movement, but also by the diversity of the traces it left behind in different countries. In Germany, for example, the effects of 1968 (or so it seems to a foreigner) were ...”

“... allegiance to the UK. For unexpectedly this has turned out to be a khaki election, with the war in Kosovo dominating headlines in the Scottish press. Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, who spoke out against the Nato action as ‘an unpardonable folly’, not only found himself denounced by Robin Cook as ‘the toast of Belgrade’, but also saw both his ...”

“... lovers perversely inflict on one another with the theme of a couple tragically divided by race and class – a theme which appears again and again in Fante’s writing, but rarely with the success of Ask the Dust. As a starving writer who asks difficult questions and lives an intense inward life, however, Bandini strongly resembles the hero of Hamsun’s other ...”

“... people with proper jobs and people who had just left school, but not, on the whole, rich or middle-class people. Not professionals. We were just enthusiastic amateurs, people from small towns who thought we could change the world but had absolutely no idea how. What we really wanted to do was change ourselves, to become different from what we knew we were, be ...”

“... of seven books of fiction and non-fiction. A first novel, Ugly Rumours, a tale of the Vietnam War, appeared in Britain in 1975 but is always omitted from his list of publications. To read it is to understand why: the book is a simplistic, moralising mess. Wolff’s pair of protagonists, a Special Forces lieutenant and an Army sergeant, are two-dimensional ...”

“... terms as a collapse of energy and pleasure – which intensified with the launch of SSRIs, a new class of antidepressant, in the late 1980s. Anxiety staggered on in DSM-III in the form of ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ (a catch-all for cases that didn’t fit other diagnoses, not least because they seemed to be unresponsive to antidepressants), but by ...”

“... it’s different now,’ he said. ‘My parents’ generation stopped voting Labour over the Iraq War. But these things have their cycles.’One of the 56 SNP MPs elected in the 2015 general election, when the narrowish failure of the independence referendum the year before and the excitement generated by the Yes campaign led to a huge increase in the SNP ...”

“... his ‘extensive and penetrating study’ of international communism just after the First World War, when he was put in charge of the ‘radical division’ of the Justice Department. He spent his whole life in Washington – his family had lived there for generations – and never seems to have doubted that he’d follow his forebears into government ...”

“... centres. When I began to ask people where the church was during what became known as the Dirty War, no one had much to tell me.Twenty-eight years later, in 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who had been in Buenos Aires through the reign of the generals, was elected pope, I wondered what his response to the disappearances had been. What was he doing, what ...”