“... Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and obsolete electrical equipment, and since the theatre was pointedly built on top of a German war cemetery the opportunity to set the most famous gravediggers in world drama to work in close proximity to some real graves was clearly too good to miss. About four hundred of us were led through dark passages and down rusting stairs into this shadowy modern ...”

“... that the doll’s short skirt is more significant than the noose round her neck.) In a middle-class house I saw a poster depicting houris reclining on tiger skins, and wondered if the tiger on the acrylic blankets was a reference to the archetypal rug, long after the last Caspian tiger had been shot. That repetitive spartan interiors could be the result ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years, and which one way or another says as much about home and landscape, belonging and solitude, war and peace, history and memory, America and Europe, as that of any American storyteller in any medium. Ford made some terrible films, and many of his good films have terrible things in them, and as a man he was almost certainly terrible all the time, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context. And there is ...”