“... excuse for Tory austerity, itself an excuse for dismantling the state. And, as Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley argue in their formidably well-evidenced The New Politics of Class, New Labour’s decision to stop talking about the ‘working-class’ marginalised millions of people.2 It isn’t that class ceased to exist, or that people ceased to feel they ...”

“... already mustered in Serbia: the missing word here would be ‘henceforth’. Nonetheless Basil Davidson, a liaison officer with Tito’s partisans, felt that E.P. had it right about the drops to Frank and his crew: London wanted the Bulgarian operation to wither. That might have been a tactical decision based on intelligence from the liaison officers ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... years. Towards the end of his chapter on Cambridge, summer vacations spent in Paris, working with James Klugmann for a front organisation of the Comintern, and the future historian Margot Heinemann are casually mentioned. Of the former, Hobsbawm delphically remarks, ‘What did one know about him? He gave nothing away’; of the latter, he says simply, ‘she ...”