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“... 1980. His communism was orthodox and his break with Stalinism came very late, but he was still, as Perry Anderson put it in the LRB, ‘after the death of Togliatti [in 1964] the most formidable figure in the PCI’. He left no real theoretical or political legacy, although his memoirs, a key source for this book, are fascinating. Giorgio and ...”

“... a powerful dissection of the problems of writing the history of the Communist Parties (by Perry Anderson), and reference to an Italian cowherd who constructed his own version of the Odyssey because he found the original too long to memorise. There are sections on Capitalism, Socialism, Feminism, Religion, Oral ...”

“... of human nature: ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made.’ As Perry Anderson has pointed out, Kant’s use of this phrase hardly justifies its adoption as a motto for Isaiah Berlin’s pessimism; but even so, its deployment is significant, for the imagery of the crooked and the straight is steeped in the ...”

“... 1968-86 and not allude to, among others, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, R.D. Laing, and the personnel of the New Statesman, would be to create another kind of absent centre. Caute solves this problem by resort to the teasing deceits of the Disraelian political romance. That is, he daringly hints ...”

“... these 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 ...”

“... trying to supply.’ Runciman might not unreasonably say the same. Only one other private scholar, Perry Anderson, has attempted anything similar. But Macaulay wished also to entertain. ‘I shall not be satisfied,’ he confessed to Napier, ‘unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of ...”

“... a submerged relation between Jameson’s nervousness of morality and his literary style. He is, as Perry Anderson has observed, one of the great writers of our time, not just one of our most formidably gifted critics and cultural theorists. Like Barthes or Foucault, he is a case of the theorist as poet or novelist. There are plenty of passages in this ...”

“... and more generous (to the critics as well as to Bourdieu) to use the life to amend the theory. Perry Anderson has compared Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, another scholarship boy who turned into a social critic – and, however reluctantly, into a kind of social success. Surely there are further conclusions to be drawn from such stories – not least ...”

“... that body of writing was shaped by avant-garde currents by no means confined to Kensington. Perry Anderson (not, one imagines, Taylor’s favourite political thinker) has argued that modernist experiment on a major scale is generally underpinned by a history of political upheaval, one which culminated in early 20th-century Europe in the general ...”

“... forbidden to set fire to a cat was a wanton restriction of one’s self-fulfilment. Bobbio, whom Perry Anderson has called ‘the moral conscience of the Italian political order’, has been a remarkably influential figure in practical politics. A leading luminary of the political wing of the Italian Resistance, twice imprisoned by Mussolini, he became ...”

“... fetishism’ in Midnight’s Children; from Abdelfattah Kilito on Hamadhānī through Perry Anderson on Montesquieu and A.S. Byatt on Balzac to Simon Gikandi on Chinua Achebe. Moretti and his contributors have succeeded in making the study of the novel – if not the entire ‘literary field’ – ‘longer, larger and deeper’ than it was ...”

“... no longer feasible to hold onto the territory. The British adopted the same method in Cyprus (as Perry Anderson recently made clear in these pages*) and in Palestine, and present-day imperialists often propose a similar solution for Iraq. In India, the British had had a long time to perfect its system of divide and rule. After the uprising of 1857, in ...”

“... law. Cooper’s unconventional insight, when combined with the arguments of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson in the New Left Review in the 1960s about the stunted development of the British state, provided the foundations of a compelling narrative about the defects of Westminster’s ancien régime constitution. Rather than holding with an ...”

“... a modest role in changing the world as well as interpreting it.Much like his English counterpart Perry Anderson, another master of languages who can move from aesthetics to political theory to realpolitik in the course of an essay, Jameson seemed like a survival from a more erudite age before the rise of modern academia, with its jealously guarded ...”

“... at the decisive importance of the 1960s in his own formation. Jameson’s fellow Marxist critics Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton (with some cosmic design evidently at work in the similarity of all three names) have already testified to his eminence in such a way as to give some sense of his importance to their own generation. It is a generation in ...”