“... characteristic sigh, as soon as the ancient form of government was taken away the entire political class ran headlong into servitude. It is essentially this Roman vision of libertas that Milton takes up in his major political tracts, and above all in The Tenure. At the climax of that work he finally asks whether the people of England have the right to put ...”

“... in the informal sector. Davis tells us they constitute ‘the fastest-growing . . . social class on earth’. In the neoliberal model they are ‘the heroic self-employed’, operating in a paradise of deregulation where initiative and entrepreneurialism will eventually triumph to the benefit of all. In practice, the growth of the informal sector has ...”

“... that would continue to absorb much of her time and energy until her death in 2007. The Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation, US actions in Central America, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and eventually the war in Iraq: she protested and organised against them all, and those fights marked her fiction. Her ...”

“... after Schulz’s birth the town went through a series of identity crises. During the First World War, Russian troops entered the town and destroyed it, burning down the family shop and home. Schulz managed to escape and ended up in Vienna, before returning home in August 1918. At that point, Drohobych was technically part of the West Ukrainian ...”

“... they can evoke the Wild West. After a rain-heavy winter, the mud is more reminiscent of Civil War Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.For more than a hundred years, tourism has been nurtured by annual events designed to attract visitors while amusing the locals. In the 1920s, the Sark Regatta provided a day of swimming, diving, pillow fights and greasy pole ...”

“... the normalisation of the far right has been advancing for decades. Italy after the Second World War had a unique political landscape. It was home to both the most powerful communist party in Western Europe and the most successful right-wing parties that openly identified with a fascist forebear. Communists were always excluded from power at national ...”

“... on settings of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ and the spine-chilling Lyke Wake Dirge, or in the War Requiem, where the point of greatest expressive intensity is felt less in the generalised terrors of the Dies Irae than in the private eeriness of the setting of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped/Down some profound dull ...”

“... to unlimited revolutionary consequences. It would be easy to write this off as a case of governing-class paranoia; but though Burke may have had a paranoid personality, Gibbon did not, and in Lausanne he was out of touch with English collective opinion. We need to take account of the rapidity with which the Revolution convinced observers that they were living ...”

“... immigrant child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How ...”

“... and the city are fields, vastly enlarged since mechanised farming came in after the Second World War, mostly arable (wheat, barley, oilseed rape), with one big dairy farm, a member of an organic milk co-operative that is under contract to Dairy Crest PLC. The redundant farmhouses, stripped of all their surrounding land except pony-sized paddocks, are owned ...”

“... Césaire’s view of Martinique was a product of his birth into the island’s small Black middle class, distinct from its mixed-race (Mulâtre) and White middle classes. His parents – Fernand, the manager of a sugar plantation, and Eléonore, a seamstress – saw education as a route to social mobility. Fernand subjected his children to a strict regime of ...”

“... now so dire as to be unignorable. The combined effects of the financial crisis, Brexit, Covid and war in Ukraine have resulted in economic conditions far graver than those on which McKinsey was consulted at the end of the 1990s. This reality can no longer be papered over with a successful financial services sector, discrete acts of redistribution or the ...”

“... his art. Critics have been more bleakly faithful both to materialist philosophy and to any future class-free utopia when they have considered all would-be revolutionary art as itself marked by the contradictions of class society (including socialism, which in classical Marxism is not the absence of social classes but the ...”

“... as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an ...”

“... 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the rich, and idolised by the poor. But your second administration was dogged by accusations of violence and corruption. Although you remained the most popular politician among the electorate, you appeared to have lost much of ...”