“... of Marxism which is still relatively uncommon in our language. The intricacy of the current international discussion of various phases of his thought contrasts very sharply with the few relatively general impressions which most of us have been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his ...”

“... of the Soviet Union, when some State Department officials were urging that the US scale down its international involvement, Holbrooke led the charge for doubling down on US hegemony. The centrepiece of his career was the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The Western press, following Holbrooke’s own script, anointed him peacemaker of the Balkans, the man ...”

“... is very far from won. Why haven’t the complete papers on the 1914 Curragh mutiny – when a group of British officers threatened to resign rather than impose Home Rule on Ulster by force – been made public? Or the papers on the Suez crisis, or on Rudolf Hess’s 1941 flight to Britain? Or on the royal family’s ...”

“... formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only. It was an example of the sinuous adaptability and capacity for reacting to circumstance that have made the Tories so effective at attaining and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since ...”

“... new powers to choke off such profligacy with higher interest rates. None of this is very new on an international scale. Welfare cuts, privatisation and financial austerity have become the small change of left-of-centre governments over the past 15 years. From the early Eighties, Western European socialist-led administrations – in France, Spain and ...”

“... in 1996 and hailed as Time’s ‘most talked about’ book of the year. It has become an international bestseller and its author has become a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.In A Nation on Trial, a book written with Ruth Bettina Birn, I sought to expose the shoddiness of Goldhagen’s book. Birn, an authority on the archives ...”

“... Hailed as a ‘little Englander’ before the First World War, by 1920 he had become an ‘international man’. In the 1950s, A.J.P. Taylor retrospectively enlisted him as a member of CND, but a decade later he was being pulled in the opposite direction by the free marketeers of the Mont Pélérin Society in Europe and the Foundation for Economic ...”

“... the splendours of the court and the implications of its culture, the complexities of the international situation. Thanks to Steven Gunn, Sean Cunningham, Paul Cavill and one or two others, we are beginning to develop a convincing political narrative that joins the story of the pretenders with the innovations in government, their domestic reception ...”

“... US law and ensure that its funds were not being used for terrorism, or for any specific party or group, but for purely humanitarian purposes. No one at the trial disputed the extent of the human crisis that the HLF sought to alleviate. On the contrary, the former US consul general in Jerusalem (the de facto ambassador to ...”

“... is a jewel-like study of a young woman, Bertha, poised unknowingly at a moment of crisis in her life. (It’s interesting not least for what it prefigures of Mrs Dalloway.) Bertha, preparing for a dinner party she will give that evening, arranges the fruit she has ordered: tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow ...”

“... known) also brought together a variety of scholars to discuss the history of the Italian and international working classes. Major figures on the Italian Left, such as Angelo Tasca, a companion of Gramsci in Turin in the early 1920s, and Pietro Secchia, the hard man of the PCI in the 1940s and 1950s, left their papers and even their libraries to the ...”

“... planners (Rexford Tugwell) and social-welfare liberals (Harry Hopkins). This was the heterogeneous group that lay behind the American version of the welfare state. A flurry of legislation followed; dams and highways were built; electricity was brought to remote rural areas; there was regulation of finance capital; people were put to work maintaining parks and ...”

“... at the Palace. Even the Cabinet war-council is cruising for some green relief, some planetary crisis to get them off the hook. Publishers have only to bring into focus all this universal, non-specific weather angst, then to feed it, fan it, explain it away. The resultant, glossy anthologies of climatic irregularities – acid rain, the Milankovitch ...”

“... How else can I take it if I don’t take it personally?’ ‘This is not an important crisis,’ he said. ‘It won’t alter the history of the world. We both knew it was coming. You would never keep me away from my people just as I would never keep you away from your books. We’ve had some good times together, maybe learned a little from each ...”

“... he plots are familiar – from patriarchy to performance in women’s studies, from interest-group pluralism to individualist rational choice theory in political science – the cumulative effect of reading the same story again and again across so many fields is arresting. When Ronald Reagan begins to sound like Judith Butler and right-wing evangelicals ...”