“... many of the necessary skills at the Bar before being lured away from Lincoln’s Inn in 2005. Class, the brusque midwife presiding at the birth of rugby league in England, gets very little say in the French story, although the ideal of the peasant character is briefly on display, before it gets drafted into a bigger plot to do with regionalism and ...”

“... overall growth rates, it was with the recession of 1973-74 that the surge after the Second World War gave way to deceleration across the wealthy world. Intellectually, Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize of 1976 signalled the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism; thereafter orthodox economics was more concerned with low inflation than full ...”

“... state collapse, military tyranny, imminent Islamist revolution, terrorist takeover and a nuclear war with India. All these dangers are present, but with the possible exception of war with India, none is as great as is usually argued. By far the greatest long-term threat is one that our media hardly ever discuss, since it ...”

“... and 1930s – not surprisingly, since of all the European upheavals at the end of the First World War, theirs was the only revolution that succeeded. But the trouble with leading the world revolution, as far as Stalin and his associates were concerned, was that you had to deal with foreigners. Abroad was scarcely less of a problem for them than for Lord ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... almost prefer to let them escape with the cheese than to pounce. Angleton was tipped off after the war by Jewish Intelligence to the effect that a British physicist working on nuclear weapons development in the States was a Soviet spy. This was the man Boyle calls ‘Basil’, or ‘the fifth man’. He was easily turned round by the Americans, after he had ...”

“... dormitories. Such is the gang spirit. Then, in our teens or twenties, we entered the mob, post-war conscripts in the years of National Service: here the public schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his ...”

“... religious unity in order to ‘discourage envy of the better-off’, so effectively that ‘class is everywhere in Punjab’s politics, yet rarely in people’s minds.’ Some play has also been made with socialistic ideals allegedly to be found in Sikh teaching, and implying – like the ‘Islamic Socialism’ talked of from time to time in Pakistan ...”

“... of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort. Occasionally they move to the vicinity of Vancouver, only to go back to Ontario again. If this patch of the North Country sounds like a provincial ...”

“... pointed to the differences between the two countries: one small, well-educated, largely middle-class; the other the largest in terms of population in the Arab world, with a high rate of illiteracy and ever widening inequality. Tunisia was a repressive police state in which information was tightly controlled and most people never dared to criticise the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”