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“... 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 ...”

“... work in recent years: the cascades, those tumbling genealogies of concepts, tropes, devices that mark out his writing as an essayist. Any reader who is familiar with the earlier Storia notturna1 – bafflingly translated as Ecstasies – will perceive the kinship between his treatment of myths and rituals there, and ideas and figurations in the more recent ...”

“... and a brief epilogue of nondescript office in time of peace. The image he left was huge, the mark modest. Little in postwar Britain, save lingering imperial illusions, is traceable to him. In exile, De Gaulle’s wartime leadership was more purely symbolic, and his adjustment to peace, at which he threw in a hand stronger than Churchill’s, little more ...”

“... always write so well? Whence this division? We need no psychologist here: we need a sociologist to mark his times, his place, his education, the financial and social structures of his Mississippi, and a few examples of his style to note his resultant grammar, syntax, phraseology and especially his vocabulary. Two sentences will show what I mean. Here is a ...”

“... Laughland, Ponting’s lawyer. By not doing this, Michael Heseltine has earned himself a black mark in important Conservative circles, where, when it comes to the leadership stakes, it will be taken into account that he did not behave as an officer and a gentleman should by going along to the Old Bailey to face the music. This is a view I have heard from ...”

“... it finds a way – with no time wasted – to bring together all the essential signs of England. Anderson shelters, used condoms, buried Victorian tannic acid bottles, discarded ring-pull cans, tarmac, railway engineers in high-viz jackets, men in tracksuits, men in dinner suits: these all appear in the first two pages. Other writers would spend a whole ...”

“... strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher ...”

“... Mao was effectively a despot. But the now familiar comparisons of him to Stalin or Hitler miss the mark. His style of rule combined three forms of lawless power, each sharing some features with tyrannies elsewhere, but whose combination produced an autocracy fundamentally sui generis. The first lay in millennial traditions of imperial sovereignty in ...”

“... is (I would suggest) no abyss, save the ideological one in metropolitan craniums. As Benedict Anderson says in another of the more critical contributions to the debate (also entitled ‘The New World Disorder’), the key misconception is that what’s going on is essentially ‘“fragmentation” and “disintegration” – with all the ...”

“... At one point, Wendell considers the goldfinches Frank loves to watch from their porch. ‘They mark their territory, the males, by singing as they fly along its boundaries, drawing the sound like twine from branch to branch,’ he says. ‘It stays there, thrumming in the air, long after it fades from our ears.’ Boundary marked by song: a vision of ...”

“... to work test, the job interview we did not pass. All these things contribute to what the late Mark Fisher called ‘the privatisation of stress’. We alone are responsible for our future yet feel powerless to shape it; ‘they’ have the power and in the future they are planning there is no place for us. Brexitism articulates a refusal of that future ...”

“... 1945 unconditional surrender forced Germany, or what was left of its western part, into what Perry Anderson has called a ‘second round of capitalist transformation’ of the sort no other European country has ever had to undergo. Germany’s bout was a violent – sharp and short – push forward into social and economic ‘modernity’, driving it for ever ...”

“... their pleasure and their politics. Their homes, however, remained some of the worst in Britain. Mark Hudson’s Coming Back Brockens – subtitled ‘A Year in a Mining Village’ – extends this anti-heroic narrative, though from the standpoint of a travel writer and a man of letters rather than, as in Beatrix Campbell’s case, that of embattled ...”

“... with all-party support, in a motion carried in the Commons by 487 to 26 votes – a high-water mark of enthusiasm for Europe. No dice: six months later de Gaulle reissued his fin de non recevoir. It would take two events to alter the situation. In the summer of 1969, de Gaulle was succeeded by his prime minister, Georges Pompidou, who had played no role in ...”

“... flowed from the Gramscian revaluations of English/British history undertaken by Nairn and Perry Anderson in the 1960s. One solid and effective consequence of that recognition was Charter 88, a fresh campaign for constitutional reform which took shape in the late 1980s. Ten years before, in The Break-Up of Britain (1977), Nairn had put forward the ...”