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“... In China the Opium War is taken to mark the beginning of the country’s modern history, seen as one of continuous national humiliation under the heel of Western imperialism, bravely but hopelessly resisted by the peasantry, until Chairman Mao came along. It takes pride of place in school history courses; monuments, museums, books, films and TV documentaries are devoted to it; and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton ...”

“... age and its ‘engineers’, and the (decline of the) culture of modernism and its ‘new class’. (Some of the 17 essays are about socio-political analysis, but they are less strikingly original.) It is worth noting that the twenty years straddle what may well be one of the most significant periods of change in modern times: the évènements de ...”

“... Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil ...”

“... as America’s adversaries build up their military power to levels not seen since the Second World War. She noted the intensifying threat of China upending the existing international order, and America’s continued support for Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression and for Israel in its fight against Hamas. ‘This arsenal of democracy helped ...”

“... man, ex-priest and Irish patriot Gerald O’Donovan, which lasted from the end of the First War (when Macaulay was 37) until O’Donovan’s death in 1942. The ‘affair’ was secret, cerebral and possibly celibate: no letters survive, and Macaulay did not keep a diary. On the available evidence, ‘passionate’ may be a misleading word to ...”

“... there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not very photogenic class’; in Cambridge, among those who sat at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso ...”

“... in another respect as well, since Finley appears to emphasise ‘status’ at the expense of ‘class’ in the analysis of social structure and social conflict. In the ancient city, ‘what we commonly call “class conflict” is invariably between “rich” and “poor”, not between landowners and manufacturers, or ...”

“... Among the welter of images and mythologies that constitute the middle-class Bengali’s consciousness – P3 and Ganesh underwear, the Communist hammer and sickle, Lenin’s face, fish and vegetable chops outside the Academy, wedding and funeral invitation cards, the films of Satyajit Ray, the loud horns of speeding state transport buses, Murshidabadi and Tangail sarees, the daily Ananda Bazar Patrika, the songs of Tagore, the destitute outside Grand Hotel, Boroline Antiseptic cream, Madhyamik school examinations (to name just a few of the constituents) – Mother Teresa, too, is present ...”

“... For generations, the American Civil War has been shrouded in clouds of millennial nationalism. Few events in US history have been as susceptible to providentialist narratives of inevitable moral triumph: stories of an exceptional nation reborn into its modern form, cleansed of its original sin of slavery and ready to shoulder its redemptive responsibilities in the drama of world history ...”

“... Alan Ryan’s search for consistency between Bertrand Russell’s reactions to the First World War and his reactions to the Vietnam War seems to me entirely admirable and in the middle of the bat, but he and I must both allow for the fact that a book written, for example, by Lord Fenner-Brockway might have found a ...”

“... A really nasty, dirty little war … Waste of time, money and everything else’ was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age. He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were ‘uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity ...”

“... cookbook point out that there is no way of knowing exactly what was on the menu at the super-first class A la Carte restaurant on the evening of 14 April 1912, because ‘unfortunately, none of the surviving passengers who ate there on the last evening tucked a copy of the menu into the pocket of a dinner-jacket, so we can only surmise what the bill of fare ...”

“... all the most interesting Italians – and certainly the funniest – came from the South. An upper class looking ‘west’ in a countryside that looked ‘east’ had much to sharpen its sense of irony. Roberta Thompson Manning’s book concerns the Russian gentry in the last two decades or so of Tsarist Russia. It is a very large and dense book, with a list ...”

“... only whites he wanted to provoke with Native Son, but members of the decorous black middle class, who felt that a figure like Bigger Thomas was a threat to their precarious status on the margins of white America.Native Son was a work of shocking intransigence in its portrayal of black rage, in its treatment of liberal whites and, above all, in its ...”

“... a good cause (when he did just that, from a trench on the Aragón front during the Spanish Civil War, someone put a bullet through it). Like it or not, ‘Orwell’ is a brand: ordinariness, common decency, speaking plain truths to power, a haggard, prophetic gaze. It is surely some or all of those qualities, rather than any particular political ...”