“... ago. His Berlin family belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum – roughly, the well-educated middle class – and rejected Hitler and National Socialism from the very first moment. They were not part of any resistance group; they did nothing ‘active’ to damage the Nazi dictatorship. They simply refused to let this dirty, vulgar, evil thing across the ...”

“... Asked by a number of interviewers to talk about their childhoods in England before the First World War, they offer notes on families, schools and factories, on nursery teas and crocheting and ringworm. They talk a little about their feelings, less about their fantasies. Collected together to make a bag of recollections, their observations are presented less as ...”

“... him delivering a speech, surrounded by attentive miners. It was here that Jaurès first saw class struggle at close quarters, in the miners’ strike of 1892. Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, the leader of the miners’ union, was sacked from his job after being elected town mayor, on the pretext that his duties meant he was missing too much work. The miners ...”

“... and was worried about finding work. I had another reason for applying: France seemed to be at war with itself, and schools were the battleground. The papers talked about violent classrooms and complacent teachers. One word in vogue was islamo-gauchisme, or ‘Islamo-leftism’, a dangerous brand of thinking that supposedly combined multiculturalism and ...”

“... Denis MacShane’s recent book* and raises very wide questions about patterns of working-class revolt, and the role of intellectuals, in Eastern Europe since the arrival of the people’s democracies – questions which will not disappear whatever the fate of Solidarity. Ascherson argues the essential unity of the Polish nation, in contrast with the ...”

“... when Communism was high fashion among young intellectuals. The decisive influence in each case was war. Not, however, the same war. Born in 1895, and Philby’s senior by 16 years, Sorge belonged to the generation that would shortly be plunged into the Kaiser’s great miscalculation. Three days after the ...”

“... and is filled with desire to join ‘the masses’. Finally, she puts herself and her class on trial and affirms her own metamorphosis: ‘How much has changed over these 13 years, both within me and around me! Life has been reborn and I have been reborn.’ In the end, she came to regard the Soviet regime as the sole legitimate repository of the ...”

“... first memory of him lingers in my cells as located in a Cambridge college, Caius, just after the war, and after lunch, over coffee. Two undergraduates were there, Neal Ascherson and myself, and someone academically senior but disinclined to pull rank: this was Eric, lean, fair-haired, Jewish-looking, German-looking, lumber-shirted, trousers arrested by a ...”

“... even offer one to Fritz. He thought Fritz wasn’t left-wing enough. Werner, from a working-class family, became a much decorated headmaster in East Berlin. But in old age, long after the Wall had fallen, his personal treasure was his participant’s pass to Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games. ‘It was the most lovely time,’ he told his grandson. From ...”

“... have been regarded as an idle dreamer. Indonesia, devastated by ten years of military occupation, war and revolution, had a literacy rate of not more than 10 per cent. Even a decade later, the income accruing to the Indonesian state was not much bigger than that of a large American university. The Philippine economy, weak even in colonial times, had been ...”

“... heir to the Comintern was premature, and that no significant section of the international working class would respond to Trotsky’s call. Deutscher did, however, share Trotsky’s belief that a period of revolutionary renewal was approaching, as a result of political crisis and impending war. He hoped to spend his time in ...”

“... of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War. The implication is not that these difficulties are in themselves related but that the thoroughgoing imagination of any significant difficulty will help us to think concretely about others. I first came across Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays ...”

“... Milovan​ Djilas was second only to Tito in the communist hierarchy of postwar Yugoslavia. In the war years, he had gained a reputation as a warrior-intellectual who could think dialectically under machine-gun fire. In Tito’s government, he served as minister without portfolio and styled himself as the state philosopher ...”

“... died in an asylum in New Orleans. Anil’s Ghost (2000) takes on the opening years of the civil war in Ondaatje’s native Sri Lanka. In The English Patient (1992), a man is dying from burns in Italy amid the mayhem of the Second World War. The new novel, Warlight, unfolds – in London and Suffolk and the lower reaches ...”

“... attic.I used to come to Ian Allan’s shop with my children after our excursions to the Imperial War Museum. That sentence may say more about my childhood than theirs – and about the retrospective mood of Britain more generally – but I look back on that time fondly. A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number ...”