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“... during the Thirties, novelists and poets, coming from a background of the professional middle class, and most of them born between 1905 and 1910. The accident of the time, as well as of the social class into which they were born, accounts for many of their attitudes during a period that covered two world wars – or ...”

“... the slaughter was great, but very far from including a whole generation – or in showing how class-bound the whole notion was: the sacrificed generation consisted more or less entirely of officers. However, it appears that he himself is under the spell of this Georgian myth; it would certainly have been possible to include a few English thinkers, notably ...”

“... sheer exhaustion – it has entailed. The party I joined was in Bermondsey, a traditional working-class Labour stronghold – one of the safest seats in the country – represented in Parliament by Bob Mellish, whose blunt and bombastic populism was exactly what that sort of seat, that sort of politics, had always considered it needed. But things were ...”

“... Revolutions have frequently been analysed and categorised. Wars, and the art of war, have been carefully studied. But the category of civil wars has been neglected. Perhaps this is because they are difficult to recognise or to define. Should we continue to write about guerres franco-françaises, arising from the Paris Commune, the Resistance movements, or the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète formed by Algerian settlers, or should we think of them as civil wars? Often there is a reluctance to admit to the existence of civil wars as anything other than an accident or temporary aberration: many English historians have liked to play down the importance of the English Civil War and tell anecdotes about the way in which the two sides paused at the moment of battle so that a hunting party could pass between them, or, more philosophically, to ask whether the Civil War had any effect on English history at all ...”

“... US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to the present that have turned America’s quintessential union city into one in whose political and cultural life labour is only a shadowy presence. A major contribution to understanding the city’s ...”

“... When Chamberlain took the British to war in September 1939, he had little idea of how they would respond. Very few of those in authority did. In their introduction to this important collection of documents, Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang point out the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that separated ministers and civil servants from ‘the broad mass of the British public ...”

“... What Kuper fails to note is that both the Hapgood and Matthews autobiographies came out after the war and were doubtless ghosted by patriotic journalists responding to anti-German chauvinism. The idea of the deferential Hapgood daring to risk his captaincy and career by telling an FA superior to put the Nazi salute ‘where the sun doesn’t shine’ is pure ...”

“... but ‘realism does not mean that you have to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation.’ The war on Gaza has killed the two-state solution by making it clear to Palestinians that the only acceptable Palestine would have fewer rights than the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa. The alternative, clearly, is a single state for Jews and ...”

“... at the outset of his ambitious and absorbing new book, ‘or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end.’ This is not for want of trying: numerous historians have analysed German opinion and behaviour at every stage of the Second World War, using above all the Meldungen aus dem Reich, the regular ...”

“... in Irish history, had not the British authorities, already knee-deep in the quagmire of the Great War, made the grave miscalculation of executing 16 of the rebel leaders, thus granting them the martyrdom that many of them had sought. Indeed, even the victims of that ‘blood sacrifice’, as it came to be considered, might have been consigned harmlessly to ...”

“... Yet both were of decisive importance in redirecting the state after a catastrophe. The Great War and the Slump alike necessitated a clearing-up operation to restore a sense of stability and normality. The paradox on each occasion was that such a restoration demanded innovations and a clear break with the past. In recent years, the idea of coalition has ...”

“... of the book that these epigrams grace are more than purely descriptive. One is headed ‘How Class War Dulled English Literature’. Gray has provided us with a brief opinionated history of England to accompany his chronologically arranged prefaces. Unopinionated histories are uninteresting. Most of the examples from earlier times are encrusted with ...”

“... exports made up 55 per cent of all coal traded internationally. Output fell during the First World War, and there were a number of crises as the Government sought desperately to maintain the coal supplies critical for the national war effort. The war over, it became clear that the world ...”