“... confident summation has a free-market triumphalism that, like Fukuyama’s End of History, may not stand the test of time, but it reflects the negative verdict of much current writing on the Russian Revolution: It has taught us what does not work. It is hard to see Marxism making any sort of comeback. As a theory of history the revolution tested ...”

“... suffered their first serious reversal when they were halted by the Red Army before Moscow. In May 1942 the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne inaugurated nearly two years of mass destruction of Germany’s towns and cities. Just under a year later came the catastrophe of Stalingrad, where the remnants of the German 6th Army were forced to surrender in ...”

“... Mayakovsky, called it ‘uncreative’. Lunacharsky and Pasternak were right, though Lenin may have been exaggerating. The rebellious, grandiose ‘I’ was the centre of Mayakovsky’s poetic universe, the logic of his style; without it, his poems were unmoored. His political rhetoric was most effective when subordinated to a larger emotion. ‘The ...”

“... believe me … I would bomb the shit out of them.’The Non-Violent Trump (at a rally): ‘There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.’Gold Star Mothers Gold Star ...”

“... by their theologically eccentric father to visit whatever houses of worship they pleased, they may have been stumped when their contemporaries demanded to know what church they attended, but the young Henry’s sense that there was something vaguely discrediting about not being able to say where they ‘went’ was more than offset by his delight in the ...”

“... of the Portraits show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was something he knew well. ‘Cézanne has no more interest in a face than in an apple, and both have no value in his eyes other ...”

“... pamphlets and brochures – even the buttons in the lift! – are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths … I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so for once they can have something just ...”

“... rigorously at work in the later films as in the early ones. Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible may belong unequivocally to the Socialist Realist epic-heroic mode. But, Arsenjuk argues, they transform that mode from within by frequent recourse to the theatrical-grotesque, thus ‘putting into crisis’ its ‘ideological function’. The climax of Alexander ...”

“... Lover’s Prayer’, ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ and ‘Pain in My Heart’ may have been his bread and butter, but Redding was also proud, headstrong and, by most accounts, happy. He seems to have taken great pleasure in the things fame brought him. By the time he turned 24 he had his own publishing company, his own production company ...”

“... people are determined to possess it, very often with just as great a determination that others may not possess it – and that possessiveness extends to its past. Even to name this land is fraught with pitfalls. An easy choice would be to call it ‘the Holy Land’, but some may think that evasive, and when I have used ...”

“... omissions. It didn’t include Norton’s favourite pink dressing gown, for example, though that may have been among the clothes in the trunk sent to Aunt Joyce.Elisabeth’s granddaughter, Lulah Ellender, has decided to tell the story of Elisabeth’s life through the lists she kept between the years 1939 and 1957. Ellender never knew her grandmother: she ...”

“... against criticism – Proteus shape-shifted in order not to answer questions, after all. There may be another, unintended consequence: if iconic works like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are almost always on view, the flux elsewhere might render them more monumental, not less. Then there is this unkind thought: uncertainty and disruption are capitalist values ...”

“... to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities that impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly 17 stone … In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present ...”

“... Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps as Sansom was before he packed in the law). He clings fondly to the idea of the commonwealth, defined ...”

“... and former employee Alexander von Hübner came to visit the 86-year-old former statesman late in May 1859, only a week before his death, Metternich summed up his own career in politics: ‘I was a rock of order’ – ‘un rocher d’ordre’.Before order could be established, peace had to be achieved. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe experienced war on an ...”