“... itself lately – Leon Trotsky was the first and for some appreciable time the only world-class figure to warn against both Fascism and Stalinism. Even Churchill in his Great Contemporaries gives credit for some part of this achievement to the Old Man. Taking Trotsky’s measure in this way, as human being and as theoretician, we see that all the ...”

“... take an essentially British perspective on the history of fellow-travelling in France since World War Two. Armed with the magic cap of François Furet’s ‘demystification’ of the Revolutionary ethos, they advance prudently into the thicket, gazing with chaste perplexity (and occasional exasperation) on the peculiar mores and customs of the denizens of ...”

“... king, with a devoted wife and brood of children; the tolerant king, devoid of the prejudices of class, colour or race; the Sailor King, whose sporting activities endeared him to many of his subjects; the imperial king, who journeyed to India to crown himself at his own Durbar; the Patriot King, who embodied wartime fortitude at a time of unprecedented ...”

“... and, as Todd points out, felt like a Greek in a Christian universe. Camus had a peculiar war – to a large extent he simply ignored it. He went to Paris in March 1940, worked on – though never wrote for – the reactionary Paris-Soir, and as the Germans occupied Paris laboured frantically to finish The Myth of Sisyphus and L’Erranger. ‘What we ...”

“... and in its most fearful shape.’ Many had arrived at the same conclusion. Through the 1790s, war with France had ground towards a costly and destructive stalemate and economic hardship had fuelled mass petitions and protests. The prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, had responded with draconian emergency measures, banning public meetings and ...”

“... In memoriam, Jesús Antonio Bejarano, murdered by unknown assassins on his way to class, 1999. Many more people continue to die in Colombia than in the Middle Eastern troubles between Israelis and Palestinians, and it’s high time more attention was paid to it internationally. It’s a country in the Northern Hemisphere and its capital city is within easy commuting distance of Miami ...”

“... offstage giant, sometimes a reluctant dictator – until his death in 1935. After the Second World War, Poland’s communist rulers suggested that he had been a fascist, which he never was. Piłsudski accepted diversity and usually respected minorities, especially Poland’s large Jewish population, which gave him electoral support. Liberals and socialists saw ...”

“... number of carefully delineated individuals. He was very conscious of just how distinctive was the class structure and culture of the England he portrayed, and the specific problems these presented the novelist. While in the Ritz, the narrator of A Dance muses: Waiting for someone in a public place develops a sense of individual loneliness, so amongst all this ...”

“... ship’ is, like everything he wrote, about many interconnected things: past and present, world war and Cold War, Europe and America, England and Germany, ideas of liberty and freedom, and various sorts of memory – personal, local, collective, national, international. Johnson sought outsider status, not because of some ...”

“... minister. They were backed – in disputed proportions – by different factions of the oligarch class, which had been the only real beneficiary of the selling off of the country’s assets in the wake of the Soviet collapse. There are now at least half a dozen books on the Maidan protests and their aftermath, most of which take ‘the Western point of ...”

“... Ladies’ Paradise, La Bête humaine) to the art world (The Masterpiece, Nana) to the theatres of war (La Débâcle), and everything in between. At times, it feels as if nothing that exists is outside Zola’s intimate knowledge. He seems familiar with every screw and bolt in the machines that lower men into mines and the trains that carry passengers from Le ...”

“... A “Left Conservative” as Norman Mailer so charmingly and conveniently puts it’), even his class (‘in any dialectical analysis ... we are part of them, the bosses, and should be pulled down’). At once defensive yet assured, such self-scrutiny is a disarming feature of many of Bragg’s novels. Characters are constantly seeing themselves at one ...”

“... for thought. But the outrush of urban populations in the United States since the Second World War, in tandem with car ownership, was on a graver scale. If that exodus was unprecedented, it was also logical. The rights to freehold tenure and development are entrenched in American values, while natural limits to expansion and the high land costs they prompt ...”

“... government, therefore, we should look beyond such economic competence, however important it is. ‘War’ is so central to the government’s conception of itself, as Toynbee has pointed out, that it influences everything. It bears the peculiar stamp of the prime minister and is unique in its folly. To describe Blair’s Middle Eastern policies as utterly ...”

“... lower orders because hierarchy means nothing to those at the apex of it. It is the lower-middle-class Malvolios of this world who have a jealous eye to social distinction. When Belch declares, ‘I’ll confine myself no finer than I am,’ he speaks as an English libertarian, striking a sympathetic chord in all those who thwart the government’s plans for ...”