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“... to do intellectual work is something I’ve known only from hearsay,’ she wrote to her mentor Karl Jaspers in 1945, after years in which each of them had believed the other dead. ‘I’ve become a kind of freelance writer, something between a historian and a political journalist.’ She had published her first Partisan Review piece – about Kafka ...”

“... new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists. But the implication is that there has been ...”

“... his interest in Classical Antiquity, in Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and in Hölderlin, Hegel and Marx, and in James Hogg, is imparted to the young ones. He is the sort of Sixties dominie who keeps saying ‘fuck’ in class and inveighing against the system. His relationship with the kids is one between equals, but they also seem to expect him to be a wise ...”

“... ones that saw it as an imitation of social conditions. Even sociologists of knowledge such as Karl Mannheim struggled mightily to get beyond the relativism implicit in their stress on the situatedness of ideologies (Mannheim’s solution, which he called ‘relationism’, involved the harmonising of the complementary perspectives of intellectuals from ...”

“... of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Benjamin was not wholly sceptical of the future, as Fredric Jameson points out in this monumental study. On the contrary, he discerned in it a messianic power to disrupt the present. Even so, he ...”

“... conscious when they were young. Ronald Fraser’s book arranges a marriage between Freud and Marx. One law for the rich and another for the poor, as the two systems can be made to seem, are laid down together in a book which commemorates a desertion of the rich for the poor. He had hit on the ‘aim of combining two different modes of enquiry – oral ...”

“... must. The attractive publication, briefly and informatively introduced, of the scripts* of several Marx Brothers films – Monkey Business (1931), Duck Soup (1933) and A Day at the Races (1937) – is a sublime invitation to stop and think about our swings of convulsiveness and weariness in the face of these films; to sense that it is essential to the ...”

“... Karl Popper is perhaps the only living philosopher of science who has had a substantial influence on the way scientists do what they do. I say ‘perhaps’ because the same claim might be made for Thomas Kuhn. However, Kuhn seems to me a perceptive sociologist of science, but a poor philosopher. Also, in so far as he has had an effect on the way scientists behave, it has been pernicious: to be a great scientist, according to Kuhn, you must do revolutionary science, and the best evidence that you are doing it is that you are so obscure and inconsistent in your statements as to be wholly incomprehensible to others ...”

“... for the nastier things he does when he’s not being a philanthropist. His teacher and mentor, Karl Popper, might have seen this as an example of the paradox of unintended consequences. Soros’s actions also illustrate one of the central puzzles of Popper’s liberalism. Like Soros, Popper wanted to have it both ways: he wanted to unify the humanitarian ...”

“... acknowledged a double heritage: ‘Our interpretation of history will be both materialist with Marx and mystical with Michelet.’ Jules Michelet wrote one of the first major accounts of the revolution, which appeared between 1847 and 1853. Marxist historians would later dismiss it as ‘lyrical’, ‘petty bourgeois’, light on the state action that ...”

“... may at first seem very distant, even diametrically opposed, to the work that first made his name, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). The Guardian’s obituary for Cohen, which described him as ‘arguably the leading political philosopher of the left’, called the book a ‘revolutionary reinterpretation of Marxist theory’. In fact ...”

“... here as an un-Irish activity. Denis Donoghue’s refusal to assist the work adds a dislike of Marx to his dislike of Freud. ‘It is easy to denounce the Christian Brothers’ to whom he listened to at school ‘for teaching a dangerous version of Irish history, and to point to the renewed violence in Northern Ireland since 1968 as the inevitable ...”

“... uprisings of 1989 seemed to bear out her thesis that revolution in its essence is not social (as Marx thought) but political, and that true political power flows only from below, from a people spontaneously acting in concert. Apart from her study of totalitarianism, Arendt’s fame rests on three books. In The Human Condition (1958), an account of the ...”

“... such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography have been persuaded to contribute an epitome here ...”

“... new laws on the bosses, if they tried to turn nasty.‘Rubbish!’ Souvarine repeated. ‘Your Karl Marx still believes in letting natural forces take their course. No politics, no conspiracies, am I right? Everything out in the open, and nothing to fight for but wage rises … To hell with you and your gradual evolution! Set fire to every town and ...”