“... Who could turn down a gig at the end of the Reich? (He hadn’t considered the scull-splitting KLF class war anthem, ‘Fuck the Millennium.’) Perhaps dizzied by the fumes from the Blackwall Tunnel ventilation shaft, I began to see what he meant. This was an alternate universe, virtual reality. The place as it stood before me, as it appeared to mundane ...”

“... one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in the ...”

“... not mean that it is wrong. There are good arguments for it, the strongest of which come from just-war theory. If you accept that wars fought as a last resort by legitimate authority with the sole intention of responding to unprovoked aggression with proportionate force are justifiable, then there are circumstances in which you may find yourself supporting ...”

“... was by contrast very approachable and friendly, ‘a tough old Clydeside revolutionary’ and a war hero with a partly wooden foot and a special medal, who had educated himself into ‘a passionate interest in literature’. When the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”