“... than the geographical, as he goes on to suggest. Was the October Revolution peripheral for Christopher Hill, who joined the Party in the mid-1930s, learned Russian – as Hobsbawm explains he never did – and wrote a book on Lenin? At all events, in spelling out what he takes to be the larger difference, of time rather than space, Hobsbawm offers ...”

“... of a dissident news-sheet, the Reasoner, crudely stencilled, as Macleod says, but inspired by E.P. Thompson and his fellow historian John Saville. (I was a camp follower.) Its third issue argued that if all the Communist Parties had banded together against intervention, it might have been averted. We wrote a joint letter to the New Statesman to make our view ...”

“... corporate executives. Even the dark horse of the race, senator-turned-actor-turned-candidate Fred Thompson, has a liberal skeleton in his closet: his lobbying firm did work for pro-choice groups during the Clinton years. In 2000 and 2004, the religious right could rally behind a candidate who said, with apparent sincerity, that Jesus Christ had ‘changed my ...”

“... the earliest photograph Peter ever printed for exhibition’.Hujar found a cheap studio on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village, at the centre of the city’s burgeoning gay scene, and in 1956 picked up a boyfriend called Joseph Raffael. That winter they took a road trip and stopped in Miami, where Thek, an old friend of Raffael’s, was living. Durbin ...”

“... interactions with LaMDA, and the way they captivated him, reminded the technology journalist Clive Thompson of the 1990s craze for the Tamagotchi, the handheld device that behaves like a plaintive robot pet, endlessly demanding ‘food’ and ‘cleaning’, which its minder – anxious to please – can provide with the press of a button. The sociologist ...”

“... According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th ...”

“... begin with, she imagined the Barbarians as a biker gang, and read Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson,’ Gordon tells us. But then she became hugely absorbed by events in the world outside, in particular the événements in Paris, and upped the calibre of her reading to Lévi-Strauss and Adorno. ‘One felt one was living on the edge of the ...”

“... had recently transferred to an airy new site in Beckenham when Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson got a job there as a house physician in 1935. Murphy wangles himself a job as an attendant in the asylum, which Beckett renames the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. Murphy/Beckett was two years younger than my grandfather, who was at the time working as an ...”

“... portrait was the basis for a new painting (is it still right to say ‘of her’?) by J.H. Thompson, which is now the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Gaskell’s Life. What relationship does this woman bear to the original? Getty Images offers, with no disclaimer, a reproduction of a watercolour from the National Portrait Gallery that for some ...”

“... began pouring down his walls from a flooded flat above him. At 6.20, he got a call from his son, Christopher, who was outside, saying that a fire chief wanted to speak to him.‘Mate,’ the firefighter said. ‘Get ready. Someone is coming to get you.’ He heard a knock at the door and it was them. Two firemen.‘How many are in here?’ one of them ...”