“... days of the German Communist Party: a foot-soldier in the German opposition to the First World War; a mute, almost faceless presence, waiting outside prisons or bent over a typewriter, banging out the anti-war ‘Letters from Spartakus’. The year after Luxemburg’s death, staying at the house of Luxemburg’s great ...”

“... Station, on the rise of socialism, and Patriotic Gore, on the literature of the American Civil War. Leavis’s greatest enterprises were the journal he founded and edited. Scrutiny, and books which were often collections of articles, such as New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation and The Great Tradition. Trilling is most important for his ...”

“... Union troops left the vanquished but still defiant South, scarcely a decade after the end of the war. Eric Foner has described the Reconstruction era, when ex-slaves became citizens and the first biracial Southern governments were elected to power, as America’s ‘unfinished revolution’. The battle over Reconstruction never ended; it has simply changed ...”

“... than a tragic, distressing or realistic act of violence emerged in the wake of the First World War, and became increasingly self-referential during and immediately after the Second. But it’s not the puzzle-solving that makes me read detective novels, though it provides much of the narrative momentum. It’s something else, something related to ...”

“... an uneasy coalition of organised workers, socialists, social democrats and the progressive middle class. What the party says it believes matters to its members because these beliefs will profoundly shape its actions if and when it forms a government.It is worth emphasising early on that Corbynism brought intellectual and political life – as well as a mass ...”

“... are asked on the jacket of Dr Edward Smithies’s book. What did criminals do during the war? How did they meet the challenges of conscription, the black-out, rationing, austerity? How did the Police cope? Understaffed but overburdened with work? What happened to juvenile delinquency, that worrying social problem of the 1930s? Did the violence of ...”

“... the haste and brutality with which they were undertaken, or the fact that they created a small class of successful post-Soviet winners (like Nemtsov) and a much larger underclass of forgotten and discarded losers. Instead he blamed everything that went wrong in the next 15 years on Putin. ‘When is that bastard finally going to go away?’ he said in ...”

“... realistic, and tell us the principal subject, the relationship between flamboyant upper-middle-class Julia and Fay, whose father was a cinema manager. The opening chapter’s ten pages enlarge on this, sketch Julia’s youthful success as a diseuse and tell us of her solicitor husband Charles’s death, mention Fay’s own glimpse of fame during the ...”

“... fallibility. And who has won? For the moment, the market economy and the primacy of the tribe over class. Nothing is final in human history and the market economy will no doubt generate its own discontents in time. In any case, market economies come in many shapes and sizes. Twenty-eight years of conservative-led governments in West Germany have not resulted ...”

“... officers in charge of him. He was nicknamed ‘the tradesman’ – a reference to his working-class upbringing. His brigadier, he discloses, ‘unfailingly referred to the Irish, even the RUC, as Bogwogs’. The Brigadier kept a model in his office of a leprechaun sitting on a rock ‘with a small plaque bearing the inscription: “First Bogwog stone ...”

“... from the Ottoman Empire. The icon shows the Annunciation and was immediately linked to the War of Independence, officially declared to have started on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation; the icon was thus taken to symbolise the rebirth of the nation. In 1940, a Greek battleship was sunk off Tinos by an Italian submarine on the day of the ...”

“... to provide a home for herself and the child of that previous union. On the surface, all is middle-class respectability in Camden Town. But as news coverage of the Primaries increases, people begin to notice the resemblance between Isabel’s son and his real father: Isabel herself is seen by the candidate’s campaign managers as a potential menace, and ...”

“... and Daniel were once secret speculators and gamblers on the Stock Exchange; Rudd had been a high-class (and sometimes not so high-class) courtesan; she had also supposedly taken on various other identities to ensnare unsuspecting men. In the court of public opinion there was no counsel to rule out evidence on grounds of ...”

“... a modern poet and would hardly expect a linked and lacquered historical account of the between-war years, with one thing giving rise inevitably, tragically, to another, although there is some of that in the pages on Versailles, which inescapably had more than economic consequences. Certain aspects have attracted the poet’s attention; he confers ...”

“... battle to expose forced labour on the cocoa plantations of Portuguese Angola. Celebrated as a war correspondent, he started off wanting to fight, and picked up his pen only when he couldn’t persuade his Radical friends to join him in setting up a legion of volunteers to help Greece in its war against Turkey. No man in ...”