Culture catcher: 19

Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, HarperCollins 2006:

From the late 1920s until his death in 1937, the Italian communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci had preached the importance of attaining ‘cultural hegemony’ within Western institutions in order to promote Marxism. He believed that the bourgeois powers, by which he primarily meant Britain, America and France, could best be undermined through capturing the high ground of intellectual and elite leadership, which he thought as important economic factors in the class struggle. Thus capitalism could be destroyed from within, even without the need for recurring financial and economic crises. Gramsci was perhaps the most important communist thinker in the West since Marx himself, whose views he modernised and adapted for the twentieth century, and nowhere were his ideas followed more effectively than in academia.

In many faculties and in several fields, such as sociology, English literature and…