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“... Stalin. He is an unswerving member of the British Stalin Society. In Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas Carlyle pointed out that modern leader-figures must give voice to emerging currents of social passion and aspiration: they need to feed souls in need of faith and identity. Scargill’s powers of leadership and ...”

“... a woman is going to frame Groucho (both turns in A Day at the Races). But Groucho’s interpretive powers achieve distinct heights of their own. The famous packed cabin sequence from A Night at the Opera is simultaneously an image of the squalor of immigrant crowding and of the immigrant imagination of luxury. Groucho is outside, as befits him, ordering ...”

“... stuck to the party line of perceiving the war as a necessary and welcome clash between imperialist powers: as communists linked with Moscow, the Partisans had to look on Germany as a nominal non-aggressor as long as the Nazi-Soviet Pact held. It was only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 that their position became free of ambiguity. But by then they ...”

“... fought for their independence against the Ottomans, and later shook off the influence of the Great Powers, inspired democratic partisans across the continent. The Greek victories became common European property, as would the triumphs of the Italians and the Hungarians. After these trials, the Greeks have never taken their place in Europe for granted. They have ...”

“... way to explaining why Ballard’s considerable creative intelligence isn’t always matched by his powers of analysis, a kind of thinking with which he anyway shows a certain amount of impatience: he’s proudly anti-academic. But he is also unquestionably a novelist of ideas – one implication of which is that he would rather explore ideas through narrative ...”

“... power, the position towards China is anything but clear. A swift Armageddon between the two powers would be worth the ecological scars if it dealt a permanent blow to global consumption. Yet ecological co-operation with China in the present is not likely to be encouraged by fantasies of democratic encirclement or offshore balancing. The US and its ...”

“... in shifting attention to their own tribulations after total defeat and ruin. The Justice Minister, Thomas Dehler, introducing the Bill, managed not to name the Nazi period, referring instead to ‘the confusion behind us’ and the ‘years of transition and . . . economic convulsion’. A second Amnesty Law in 1954 also bundled together those guilty of crimes ...”

“... Norman’s studiously unattributed materials is a freestanding memorandum written in 1671 by Thomas Hobbes, who in 1623 had been employed as Bacon’s secretary. Addressed as a private note to Hobbes’s patron, the Earl of Devonshire, it exhibits a degree of authenticity that biographers will kill for. Bacon, it says, had beenengaged in the composition ...”

“... globalisation as a revolutionary force in the late 1990s, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman became a guru to corporate chieftains from Bangalore to Atlanta with his argument that neutering government, American-style, and deregulating economies were necessary and inevitable steps on the path to a ‘flat world’. After 9/11, George ...”

“... Mary Stuart back to Scotland; in the royal accounts, his salary is paid for Martinmas Term 1561-2. Thomas Randolph, the Marian exile who was charged with the task of bringing the Earl of Arran back to Scotland in 1559, reported to Cecil in April 1562 that the Queen, instructed by a learned man, ‘Mr George Bowhanan’, read daily after dinner ‘somewhat of ...”

“... or Chatterton or Baudelaire or D.H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway as conventional, but what about Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope or Jane Austen or Charles Dickens or John Galsworthy? And, in particular, what about John Mortimer? He would, I think, indignantly deny the suggestion, but although he espouses unconventional causes he represents the essential ...”

“... endless cabinet committees and a full-blown public enquiry, the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, during the course of the Commons debate, announced his resignation. If relatively small events can excite such interest in Parliamentary minds, it is not surprising that there are plenty of people prepared to rake over the coals, at an appropriate ...”

“... respect for the religious behaviour of his fellow Catholics. In politics he took the view that the powers that be were ordained of God. Pope Leo X, a Medici nephew and one of Martines’s pet abominations, hit the nail on the head when he said that the Luther case was ‘a quarrel among monks’, meaning between Dominicans and Augustinians. Much the same could ...”

“... After the first death,’ Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘there is no other.’ I know what he is getting at, I suppose, but it isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other deaths, but the death last month of my friend Michael Rogin was a shock. It’s not that we had, in recent years, spent much time together. I left Berkeley, where we taught together on the faculty of the University of California, in the mid-1990s, and almost immediately lost touch with most of my network of friends ...”

“... from early times and show its inadequacy. A question which remains unresolved is quite what powers the continuing appeal and often passionate adherence to the legend. So much smoke, there must be a fire burning somewhere. But one might well think that, nowadays, it’s recent politics that supplies the match and blows the flame, and not anything to do ...”