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“... we catch up with him at the beginning of Magic Seeds, he has left Africa and is living in Cold War Berlin with his sister Sarojini, ‘in a temporary, half-and-half way’. His search for a place in the world, for wholeness, starts again as if from scratch. Sarojini, like her brother, has also made an ‘international marriage’, to Wolf, a radical-chic ...”

“... is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini. Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s ...”

“... and Munich to his installation as chancellor in 1933 and on to the outbreak of the Second World War. Ullrich has strong feelings about the way Hitler came to power in January 1933, enthroned by a ‘sinister plot’ of stupid elite politicians just at the moment when the Nazis were at last losing strength. It didn’t have to happen. He constantly reminds ...”

“... ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and renewal. Acknowledging his intellectual debt, Le Roy Ladurie pointed out the irony that the ...”

“... with what the theory demands. This is particularly important in the case of the decision to go to war, since it was the war that frustrated the revolutionaries’ attempts to decentralise the administration, and made possible the brief triumph of the ideologists. Furet must therefore present it as inevitable if, as he ...”

“... What Should the Left Propose?, published two years ago, was only one blow in a long guerrilla war. He has always held that a lot of earlier revolutionary dross should be discarded – and so should the assorted defeats and dead ends derived from it. This year’s The Self Awakened tries to help the left further down the road, and no doubt Free Trade ...”

“... of proto-socialist ideal society, one has to explain how it can have been destroyed by a civil war within the Committee of Public Safety and the execution of half a dozen deputies. If Thermidor and the Directory marked the triumph of a (never defined) bourgeoisie, why were the new men such incompetent actors of their historical roles? When politics had at ...”

“... revealing the characteristic blindness of the elite to the habitual discomforts of the working class – ‘are more annoyed by hardships and rough living than their masters.’ It was far more ‘agreeable and advantageous’ to hire a local, so long as no antiquarian knowledge was expected, let alone trusted if offered. For that, (hand)books were the ...”

“... effects of escalating militancy ruined suffrage’s prospects in the years immediately before the war, but when the issue re-emerged in 1916, its male and female opponents still could not get along. Curzon, convinced the cause was lost and accustomed to backroom deals, declined to lead a last-ditch battle in the Lords and pragmatically abstained on the vote ...”

“... just as your average Afghan bazaar is for newly arrived visitors from London. In the former upper-class residential area of Wazir Akhbar Khan, the Western embassies lurk behind high walls and rolls of barbed wire, while the NGOs and media organisations have taken over the villas of the former elite. Repeated lootings have emptied the villas of much of their ...”

“... of British defences, it would be argued that he was trying to overthrow Baldwin. The Second World War enabled Churchill to turn the tables on the sceptics. Having imposed his authority as a war leader, he proceeded to impose the Churchillian interpretation of events, enshrined in a six-volume ...”

“... to commemorate the men from the Great Eastern Railway Company who had died in the First World War. The guest of honour was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who unveiled a memorial in the station’s booking hall. It was marble, seven metres high and eight metres wide, and recorded the names of the 1220 men who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to ...”

“... Government, but the power of organised labour too, making the ultimate triumph of a black middle class all the more certain. The most radical workerists, such as the National Forum’s Neville Alexander, argue that a. the South African revolution must be won by the black working class, b. that sanctions inevitably inflict ...”

“... politics that claims to be present in all their responses – requires them to wage factitious war as a matter of display. The cuckoo may be determined to take over the nest, as Gross fears, but that too is seen from both sides as more show, gambit and stratagem than reality: an aspect of the technique of presenting the literary past and present in ...”

“... So he was a ‘fellow-traveller’ from 1932 up to and beyond the start of the Second World War. The shift was easy to understand. The crisis of 1929 and the impotence of any government, but especially the Labour Government, to soften its dreadful effects, suggested that there was no solution to capitalism save to overthrow it. There was no point in ...”