“... Painter’s Proust, Michael Holroyd’s Strachey and Shaw, Richard Ellmann’s Joyce and Wilde, John Richardson’s Picasso, Maynard Solomon’s Mozart, Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein and Russell, Hermione Lee’s Woolf, Judith Thurman’s Dinesen and Colette – have been distinguished by their intense, liberating attention ...”

“... for their root causes. He took out a subscription to New Internationalist. He read Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Greg Palast. ‘It slowly dawned on me,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be a hidden hand behind seemingly random, unconnected events. I came to this realisation myself, long before hearing of the term “conspiracy theory” or “new world ...”

“... was the rustle of the Holy Ghost, hers an oracular hooga-booga. The objections that Howe, Rahv, John Simon, the art critic Hilton Kramer and other keepers of the scrolls lodged against her were as much about the 1960s as they were about her, for no one in the Family (as Norman Podhoretz, a former Partisan Review-er, dubbed them) personified the 1960s more ...”

“... And Wittgenstein wrote the 80-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his revolutionary critique of Russell and Frege, from the trenches of the First World War. It does nothing to belittle the achievements of Cavaillès and Wittgenstein to observe that, if Sartre had been active during the Resistance, he wouldn’t have managed to publish an 850-page ...”

“... the time and afterwards. It is enough to think of Luxemburg or Lenin, or for that matter Bertrand Russell or Romain Rolland. A contemporary word was readily available to grasp the real nature of the conflict, but Bloch could never bring himself to use it. Instead of the term ‘imperialism’, he stuck to the tropes of social patriotism, going so far, in the ...”

“... from La Paz to view the body, and the famous photographs were taken – later compared by John Berger to Mantegna’s Dead Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. That evening, when the journalists had gone, the two local doctors performed an autopsy, which showed beyond doubt that Guevara had been shot long after capture, though this only emerged ...”