“... can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head. If that had happened, what would the world think of him now?We ...”

“... England. Balzac’s great successor, for Lukács, was the towering figure of Tolstoy, whose War and Peace represents a peak simultaneously of the historical and of the realist novel in the 19th century. In societies more advanced than Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had by this time pitted a revolutionary working ...”

“... what his companion talked about. He was interested and expert in everything around him – the war, Buddhist religion and art, the geological specimens he would retrieve from every ditch, the properties of mud, luminous insects, the ancestry of cycads, but his recurrent theme was the fundamentals of biology and of the enormous developments just becoming ...”

“... and were still talking about starting on a similar plan for Bohemia when the First World War started. As Heribert Adam says, the success of apower-sharing system of this sort depends on the members of each ethnic group wanting to identify themselves through a group consensus. That is true, more or less, of the Afrikaners. The first part of Ethnic ...”

“... those bits not occupied by houses, quarries, roads and railway tracks – was owned by the War Office, which had appreciated the peninsula’s strategic significance since early in the 20th century, when Germany emerged as a threat to British naval supremacy and a local hilltop was equipped with big guns pointing towards the North Sea. By the time of ...”

“... in social history as an impressive statistic: one family in 20 still lives in this kind of inter-war council housing. Homes fit for Heroes tells how they came to be built, and why they took the form they did, but Dr Swenarton also intends to ‘contribute to our understanding of design in general and especially of its relation to ideology and the ...”

“... New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is illegal under international law.’ But ‘it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.’‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is ...”

“... added a lack of martial spirit to the bill. For V.H. Galbraith, Richard was a ‘misfit in his own class’ with ‘nice personal habits’, a ‘non-co-operator, who hates rugger and cricket and refuses to shout on the touchline’. (Galbraith revealed something of his own background here: a public school boy, he had shown ‘impetuous courage’ in the First ...”

“... heavy metal band Scorpions released ‘Wind of Change’, a song celebrating the end of the Cold War: ‘The future’s in the air/Can feel it everywhere.’ It also contained the hopeful lines: ‘Let your balalaika sing/What my guitar wants to say.’ It turns out, though, that they had it the wrong way round: it is Putin who calls the tune to which ...”

“... house nearby and helped look after him as he grew old. The poet’s heroic period was in the Civil War, when he acted as welfare officer to the Union wounded, bringing them fruit and candy as Hemingway was to do to the Italian Army in 1916. Unlike Hemingway, he made no personal heroic myth out of it, though what he saw and helped do was probably more terrible ...”

“... relief for unemployed intellectuals’, and it was given to Orwell during the early war years when from August 1941 to November 1943 he was paid £650 a year as a talks producer in the Indian Section of the Far Eastern Service. He was hired as Eric Blair, but those who brought him in were clearly signing up George Orwell, author of Burmese ...”

“... outright inconsistency. Consider all the classes that are not members of themselves, such as the class of dogs, which is not itself a dog, and try to combine them into a big class of their own, the class of classes that are not self-members: then you have the result that this ...”

“... ways of thinking and behaving that have almost entirely disappeared, along with the social class that bred them in a certain city at a certain time. While the forces that shaped Johnson still flourish all around (and particularly above) us – floreat Etona and no mistake – the society in which Livingstone was reared is now dust and ashes. Almost ...”

“... the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned into a flood with the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War that followed. The Jewish population of Moscow, Russia’s new capital, grew by a factor of almost ten between 1912 and 1926, and continued to grow until by 1939 it had reached 250,000, making Jews the second largest ethnic group in the city. More than a ...”

“... sensible administration of business begin. The third is the dream of the politician who transcends class identity, moving away from defining origins not just to enjoy wider worlds but to take the wider view. This is also a dream about enlightenment, figured as the logic of a life story. Its hidden premise is the thought that those who most completely ...”