“... not vindictive, and the Western media chorus portraying his regime as authoritarian is wide of the mark. It was in full voice when I was in Caracas. The cause this time was a privately owned TV station (RCTV) whose 20-year licence the government had refused to renew. RCTV, in common with most of the Venezuelan media, was involved in the 2002 coup against ...”

“... If we-compare him with the two other great liberal thinkers of émigré background who left their mark on this country in the period of the Cold War, Hayek and Popper, these traits stand out. The Austrian duo have their own important differences, as Ralf Dahrendorf has recently suggested. But the common features are plain. The specialised work of each, in the ...”

“... the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy wunderkind.2 ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy,’ he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century”.’ How will this entrancing prospect come ...”

“... different figures in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre state’, ‘agricultural involution’ and quite a few others, which then travelled ...”

“... Todd’s careful reconstruction of Delaney’s background and childhood shows just how wide of the mark this is. Yes, Delaney was solidly working class, born in Salford in 1938 to Joseph Delaney, a bus driver of Irish extraction, and his wife, Elsie Twemlow, the daughter of millworkers. Yes, they moved around: Shelagh, her mother and her grandmother to a flat ...”

“... with him in this collection testify well enough. Far more than Raymond Williams or Perry Anderson, and more persistently than E.P. Thompson, Hall has been the Left’s finest instance of the strategic intellectual, the theorist as mediator and interventionist, broker and communicator, bringing the more arcane flights of Frankfurtian or ...”

“... scholars who had had their careers ruined and/or their characters assassinated. In 1975, Perry Anderson published Lineages of the Absolutist State, at the end of which is an 87-page ‘Note’ on the theory of the Asiatic mode. Anderson shows that Marx’s views on Asia differed little from those of ...”

“... conceived early on as a trilogy, and the last, which is more self-standing, with features that mark it off from its predecessors. Covering the epoch from the French Revolution to the First World War, the trilogy follows a consistent scheme, classically Marxist in its logic: each volume begins with an account of the economic foundations of the period, then ...”

“... never to age or look antique, as live action inevitably did. Gabler quotes the layout artist Ken Anderson quoting Walt: ‘You know, tyrants in the past built these huge buildings – look how big and powerful I am. And they towered over the people just to impress the people.’ The implication was that Disney wanted his creations to welcome the ...”

“... study, one giving its own specialised contribution to Dante studies as represented by William Anderson’s masterly Dante the Maker, now reissued in paperback. Professor Mark Musa’s new version of the Purgatorio is also a notable contribution not only to Dante studies but to the poet’s accessibility to English ...”

“... self-impressionists, veracious and subtle (Proust, Woolf), ventriloquists and counterfeiters (‘Mark Rutherford’, the pseudonym used by William Hale White, and, you could add, Edward FitzGerald), foreshadow current developments in autofiction, in which memory acts become, as the filmmaker Chris Marker put it, ‘the lining of forgetting’, where ...”

“... not every intellectual has been comfortable when arguing against extreme positions, or when the mark of approval goes only to those with average views. Take the case of R.G. Collingwood, who had no radio or television career and did not write for the newspapers, who was an exceptional scholar and philosopher, but who never lived up to his own ...”

“... to crowds expecting something more combative. Such discordance between attack and response is the mark of a pattern that, since the turn of the century, has distinguished Brazilian politics within Latin America. It is not the only country that has seen class conflict escalating in a crisis. But nowhere else has this been so one-sided. Even when Lula was at ...”

“... rage’, his ‘calm, generous and open’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was 38; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of ...”

“... the cycle in the 20th (Mann to Hitler to Erhard). Relatively benign though current pride in the D-Mark might be, compared with the hubris of the Gründerzeit, economic performance was an inherently unreliable basis for a sense of national identity, subject to downswings and disillusionments. What was needed instead was stable political institutions ...”