“... 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 ...”

“... century its docks handled 40 per cent of global trade. But decline set in after the First World War. By the 1970s and 1980s, the churning forces of capitalism and imperialism had receded, leaving the city stranded and struggling. As Wetherell writes, the ‘mystifying tendency for the spaces of everyday life to be dissolved and remade by capital had stalled ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially of the southern colonies, could most aptly be characterised as agrarian precapitalist and … Will, who at this point … is completely fed up, includes himself in the conversation. WILL: Of course that’s your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... generation of political leaders may have to be sacrificed. There is no doubt that the political class has been badly frightened by the public response to the paedophile affair – and been galvanised into quite untypically rapid action. Even King Albert, an easy-going monarch who involves himself as little as possible in public affairs (unlike the more ...”

“... The Meeting at Telgte, addresses directly the fate of the Writer. At the close of the Thirty Years War Germany’s leading poets and scholars meet at an inn in the small town of Telgte near Münster, where the peace negotiations are being protracted, to read their works to each other, to discuss literary principles, and especially to consider whether there is ...”