“... me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding ...”

“... has a written constitution; the trouble is that it has had five.) The second is an open political class, so that the representatives don’t become a closed interest group in themselves. In this way, the availability and ubiquity in the United States of a legal education, in other contexts the mark of cabalistic self interest, becomes a badge of political ...”

“... two of the agents were arrested, and then exchanged for the antidote by King Hussein.) During a class at Damascus University, where I have been studying Arabic for the past two months, our teacher told us that the flyover was normal Israeli practice, and that in 2003 targets were bombed on Syrian soil. ‘But there is no problem,’ she said. ‘Welcome to ...”

“... unfit for human habitation, perhaps for thousands of years’. Anyone who lived through the Cold War is familiar with stories of nuclear catastrophe and toxic tragedy in the former Soviet Union because Western journalists and Soviet activists went to great lengths to expose the acts of ecocide committed by the USSR’s military-industrial complex. In the ...”

“... on action, seriousness and good works. She was also – again like Thatcher – permitted a first-class education. Hobbled with thick, unmanageable blonde hair, thick ankles, and thick glasses for extreme shortsightedness (she did not bother with contact lenses until she was 33), Hillary threw herself into school work, into being a Brownie and Girl Scout, and ...”

“... love affair and the unhappiness that followed; her work in a soldiers’ canteen; and after the war her move to Paris and her marriage to the mysterious Jean Lenglet, about whom she seems to have known unaccountably little. She had now started to live the kind of futile, penurious life so well described in her first four novels: sleeping a lot, drinking a ...”

“... not quite as definitively out in the cold as those subsisting in the Pantheon of the Working-Class Movement, with the inscription ‘They Lived for Communism and for the People’, that Rév writes about. Martyrs to what is not clear. Their resting place is in public view but they are not seen, out of mind and memory because the history to which their ...”

“... So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure ...”

“... town or village. To grown-ups, or those I met, these clues were unknown, or were so until the war came and they were ostentatiously swept away so as not to give assistance to enemy parachutists, but to a small boy, always in doubt that he had been anywhere unless he could write the name down with a pencil in a notebook, these signs had a value born of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... made Julian the Apostate.’ The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity does not, despite its subtitle, collude with Gregory of Nazianzus in the making of ‘Julian the Apostate’. Rather, Hans Teitler follows the best recent scholarship to suggest that Christian narratives of Julian’s ‘...”

“... of the Fianna Fail Party, Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass, had fought in the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright ...”

“... of the present social order, had considerable resonance in the year in which England went to war with revolutionary France. Godwin’s treatment was, all the same, relentlessly theoretical. His dislike of constraints upon the individual led him in principle towards anarchism, but in practice his gaze rarely dropped to contemplate the mob in the streets ...”

“... much less easy to see how those trapped in the situation could have taken those other ways out. War with Argentina is self-evidently a ludicrous way of making the simple point that a transfer of sovereignty ought to take place only with the consent of the Falklanders; thirteen months of hardship, picket-line battles, lost production and the huge expenses of ...”

“... born into an age that still thought speaking French was like playing the piano: something upper-class girls did. But French was also a space for her to dream in: the Bouviers were descended from French royalty, the story went (they were more likely shopkeepers in the Gard). In 1949, bored of Vassar’s rolled-up jeans, Bouvier applied for the Smith College ...”