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“... Eric Hobsbawm is one of Britain’s most creative Marxist historians. Anyone who teaches at a school or university is aware of the effect of his writing, even on those who do not know from which stable he comes. He has this effect because he can discover in history a dynamic yet comprehensible movement. Furthermore, he can write two kinds of history with equal facility: there are books with great sweep like Industry and Empire and there are others, like Primitive Rebels or Labouring Men, which are more intimate and local in their focus ...”

“... Just over a quarter of a century ago, shortly after Ted Heath’s surprise defeat of the Wilson Government, Tony Benn addressed a Fabian Society meeting in a gloomy Westminster basement. With his usual happy choice of language, he described how fired-up he had been on eventually becoming a minister in Wilson’s Cabinet; he had always wanted to get his hands on the levers of power, he said, and at last he was going to do just that ...”

“... of a new series to be continued with The Failure of the Macmillan Government, The Failure of the Wilson Government, The Failure of the Heath Government and so forth. As the 30-year rule uncovers the frailties of each in turn of a not particularly glorious row of administrations, opportunities will accumulate. Besides its fairly average quota of what might be ...”

“... Garbo became, the more considerate they were in return.’ If Pujol’s example is anything to go by, the way to succeed as a double agent is to make so much noise you block out any doubts in the enemy’s mind, forcing them instead to declare how much they love you. Among his other requests, Pujol made insistent demands for money from the Germans. The ...”

“... a distinguished group of historians, including Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock, offered a compelling account of the reasons British Americans broke with monarchy and then embarked on such a distinctive constitutional experiment, hedged with an idiosyncratic Bill of Rights. For example, the curiously tangled syntax of the Second ...”

“... in the grip of principles and pressures they couldn’t resist. Two principles came with Woodrow Wilson: national self-determination, in its unqualified form the source of much difficulty then and plenty since; and ‘open diplomacy’, a contradiction in terms credible only to the inexperienced but music to the ears of the demagogic. The most damaging ...”

“... Irish state and raising funds. In his absence, Griffith led the Government, which was forced to go underground after Dáil Éireann was proscribed in September 1919. In the subsequent guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 ...”

“... silly slogan on her tee-shirt: ‘All Men Are Rapists.’ Then there was the time Jane made him go to a ‘Men’s Group’ meeting. ‘Men’s Groups’ were (and perhaps still are) gatherings of men who support the Women’s Movement. One selfish reason for so doing is very old: ‘I like a filly with spirit’ is the cliché. But to be thrust into a ...”

“... Brecht, moreover, was one of the few people who appreciated Lorre’s greatness. According to Eric Bentley, he believed that Lorre was the modern Hamlet and was fond of quoting the line ‘He is fat and scant of breath’ to prove what a great Hamlet Lorre would have made. The obstacle was getting anyone to finance such a project. In 1946, a Brecht-Lorre ...”

“... it was unsuitable for the RAF’s only available jet bomber, the Canberra. Blue Danube did not go into operation with the RAF’s first V-bomber squadrons until 1956. Meanwhile work at Aldermaston was concentrated on a smaller fission bomb that could achieve a yield comparable to Blue Danube but at only 20 per cent of the weight. This weapon, code-named ...”

“... world, he turns to pragmatics, and specifically to the theory developed by Sperber and Wilson in Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986). The nub of the theory is that the things people say to each other are perceived as relevant, in a greater or lesser degree, to the context in which they occur, and hence are framed in ways calculated to ...”

“... contribution to the purification of the language has been persuasively discussed by Edmund Wilson: he inspired in others a similar ‘lucidity, precision and terseness’, a better rhetoric, a ‘language of responsibility’. Wilson’s discussion occurs in his study of the literature of the American Civil ...”

“... field’s core concepts (realism, liberal internationalism) back to Thucydides or Machiavelli or Wilson is, Vitalis insists, a post-1945 invention. Instead, at the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not ...”

“... the director of MI5’s ‘E’ (Overseas) division wrote in 1961, could ‘so easily go sour on us’ if ex-colonial subjects should ‘identify us in, or even suspect us of, activity behind their backs’. Walton claims that all the most disreputable methods employed to hang on to the empire – resettlement of entire populations, mass ...”

“... Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession ...”