“... I had managed only one speech against the war in Kosovo when I was carted off to hospital in the middle of the night with what I later discovered was an aortic aneurism. Hardly had the surgeons opened me up than my aorta, an artery which runs from heart to head, ruptured. Almost all such ruptures end in death, and for many weeks I lay in a coma ...”

“... made sense on the sub-Marxian postulate that capitalism could be superseded by socialism through class war over the ownership of the means of production. Organised labour was to provide the shock troops, fighting for the working class as a whole – an ultimately irresistible driving force for radical change. The fact ...”

“... revenges himself when grown up on awful, snobbish mother by burlesqueing her upper-class values and becoming known for Appalling Behaviour. Runs away from Rugby to help Esmond Romilly bring down the public schools. Joins CP at Oxford, leaves it after defeat of Spanish Republic. Can’t endure seeing the Establishment take over the ...”

“... The deliberate anonymity of the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War needs to be supplemented with the personal memoirs of those closely involved, and Noel Annan appears well suited to the task. In 1941 he joined the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office, and worked in section ...”

“... hand, if you’re looking for an introduction to the indignant rhetorical style of the culture-war Right, Bias fits the bill. The book begins by reminding the reader that in 1996 Goldberg wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal criticising his employer, CBS News, for broadcasting a put-down of the ‘flat tax’ (a conservative fad of the ...”

“... Steere in Oxfordshire were blown up into imaginary rebellions, couched in the vocabulary of class war, and judges showed their usual ingenuity in expanding the scope of the law of treason. The danger to the interests of property-owners was not entirely imaginary. Both in 1596 and after the more dangerous Midland Rising of 1607, there were some ...”

“... else in the room sounding retarded. Anyway, there can be no doubt that before and during the Great War all the golden young men who were to be cut down in battle resolutely besieged her. The most they could hope for, apparently, was to lie chastely beside her, but they were ready to settle for that. They knew what sex was and some of them were even accustomed ...”

“... passes Cossacks, gangsters, prostitutes and Russian schoolgirls in starched white uniforms; in his class at school there are pupils of eight nationalities; there is a picture of the Tsar on the classroom wall but the Russian Empire is crumbling. The childhood of the author of Ali and Nino – and of his hero – was a vivid and contradictory affair. Ali Khan ...”

“... clergymen and scientific humanists should close ranks against the doctrines of materialism and the class war. Published when he was 31, Ecce Homo revealed a young man ambitious for leadership and skilled in the arts of communication. Perhaps these were qualities that weighed with Gladstone when in 1869 he appointed Seeley to his Regius chair: but he ...”

“... Foden’s first two novels, The Last King of Scotland, about Idi Amin’s Uganda, and the Boer War-set Ladysmith, seemed, though far from flawless, almost effortlessly distinctive and intelligent; and while his third, the self-consciously terse, thrillerish Zanzibar, was less impressive, it is with Turbulence, his first book since his appointment as ...”

“... a series called ‘Literature in History’. In a writing career that almost spans the post-war period, he has established himself as this country’s leading critic within academic English of the very concept of ‘Literature’. So much so, that he would have preferred to see English Literature replaced as a core subject in our school and university ...”

“... pronounced. In Latour’s most recent work to appear in English, On the Emergence of an Ecological Class, written with Nikolaj Schultz and published after his death, ecology is more or less synonymous with environmental activism; you could even think of it as a programme. But not all his writing is so easy to follow. He can be perfectly clear as he leads you ...”

“... influence of Stalinist ideology in Soviet society. Stalin’s conception of progress through ‘class war’ captured the minds of a whole generation of people, barely literate and new to the city. It gave them black-and-white explanations of the confused world in which they lived, and goals in which to believe as a remedy for their poverty. Many of ...”

“... those of the soon-to-be-martyred priest Miguel Hidalgo at the beginning of Mexico’s 11-year war with Spain in 1810. It was an impressive piece of stagecraft, but the most memorable part of the night was the fireworks show, the rockets bursting from behind the cathedral and filling the sky as if the city itself were in flames. Calderón’s big bash ...”

“... Ripka, the Czech journalist. Connections helped, of course: her background was remorselessly upper-class – her mother had 72 first cousins, one of whom was Clementine Churchill. Ambassadors recognised their own kind and provided time and invitations. Nevertheless, she must have been a remarkable girl: idealistic, high-minded and convinced – naively but ...”