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“... a striking index of the difference. Paris is the epicentre of the Comédie humaine, but Balzac’s world in no way stops there, as that of Dickens does in London. Equally memorable are his depictions of Saumur, Angoulême or Tours. In Stendhal and Flaubert, the narratives of Le Rouge et le noir and Madame Bovary depend on Besançon and Rouen. In the 20th ...”

“... near the elevators of Trump Tower. It will not be stemmed even after the memoirs of Trump’s associates, unreliable narrators in the spirit of their leader, have been removed from the remainder bins in used bookstores.A week after the inauguration, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Origins of Totalitarianism were number one and number 36 respectively on the ...”

“... sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal. It is afflicted by the same soaring levels of poverty and workplace exploitation as the rest of the UK, but devolution has enabled the Scottish government, controlled by the ...”

“... years later Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general of the United Nations, appeared in Bunche’s life. Bunche was running the trusteeship division at the UN, proving himself capable, imaginative and cool in a crisis; in 1948 Lie made him deputy in a two-man team charged with mediating the war being fought for control of Palestine. A few months into the ...”

“... sent to penal camps in Algeria. At least seven million workers came out on strike in 1968: that’s a first and a last in Western Europe. In its wake there were tangible gains for the majority of French citizens. Two militants at a Peugeot assembly plant in Franche-Comté were killed by security forces in the aftermath, when the workforce decided to stay on ...”

“... we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes this to be the work ...”

“... of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God’s great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the sympathy of the world ...”

“... of this essay is also available online.In Britain, the early 1990s saw the breakdown of Thatcher’s rule and the passage to a less strident neo-liberal agenda, under the atonic stewardship of Major. In France, the trend was in the opposite direction. There, the dominance of a market-minded consensus reached its height in the early years of the second ...”

“... If Communism is only sketchily described, then post-Communism is simply unthinkable in Marx’s philosophy of history. So how can we make sense of his remarkable masterpiece in the 150th anniversary year of its original publication? The Communist Manifesto still feels alive to the touch ...”

“... Washington by introducing ‘greater discipline’ into American foreign policy, Nye and Keohane’s study left no doubt about the pay-off for Washington. ‘Regimes usually are in America’s interest because the United States is the world’s foremost commercial and political power. If ...”

“... extent of it in her graceful English translation.What were the aims of this vast design? Braudel’s previous themes were virtually invented by him – strikingly original quarries from the past little mined before. Here he chose the most traditional of subjects, on which an abundant literature already exists, much of it distinguished. Why then a new history ...”

“... portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of the 20th century, and overall narrative of modernity?1 In overarching conception, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes can be regarded as a single ...”