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“... The present novel completes Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy. It ends just before the war itself ends, with the attempted crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal in which Wilfred Owen was killed. You can read it without having read Regeneration or The Eye in the Door, because these are novels that cover the same ground again, and again, like the battles their characters replay in memory and nightmares ...”

“... an excellent historical writer for children – recalls that he was early made aware ‘of a Civil War feeling, that Hereford and the Welsh had stood for the King, and that across the Severn to the East of us were others who had taken another side. I was to hear much about this business in my early youth, for its passions still ran high.’ Very few children ...”

“... Ndebele, Ranger argues that the Kikuyu élite were in process of becoming a land-owning capitalist class ready to collaborate with the colonial power and join the Home Guard, thus sharpening African resistance to British rule on the whetstone of class struggle; whereas Ndebele protests were articulated by compromised chiefs ...”

“... slopping up orthodox doses of the black stuff, are confronted by an ironic account of the Class Warrior on the toot. And some of them don’t like it, they are there for the sounds, the freeform headaches. They didn’t palm their complimentary tickets for this filth. The cold sober rush of Home’s amphetamine prose is delivered, with no ...”

“... he was ninety he would be able to free himself from ‘these fleshly desires’.In the late Cold War, letter-writing provided one of the chinks in the iron curtain. Harold began writing to the Aidovs after seeing the name and address of their daughter in a publication by Amnesty International, a translation of Soviet samizdat that included contact details ...”

“... Hobsbawm’s writing is grounded in this classical Marxism and his politics in the mass working-class parties which high capitalism created. The reader should know one other thing: that he has been all his political life (and still is) a member of the Communist Party, and this, too, is unusual among British Marxist historians of his generation. In the 15th ...”

“... red lights near Dublin’s wide main thoroughfare. Andrews’s family belonged to the lower middle class, and lived over their small dairy business in a slum area. He grew up close to the kind of people whose talk has been immortalised by Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan. Indeed, Andrews claims that Fluther Good in O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars was once ...”

“... Protestants who have always found a natural home in Republican movements. But it was the 1914-18 war which, more even than the Dreyfus affair, brought Léon Blum belatedly into politics – he was already over forty. The Union Sacrée, uniting Left and Right in a wartime coalition against Germany, put him at the head of a department in collaboration with ...”

“... Pat Barker​ has written about war, mostly the First World War, again and again. In her new novel, Noonday, the last book in a trilogy, she takes characters forged in the first war, in Life Class (2007) and Toby’s Room (2012), on into the second – or into the second phase of one long conflict ...”

“... Communist parties – and had a smaller membership among women than they did. Like other working-class parties, it never succeeded in finding a stable balance between local and workplace activism. Like others, it attracted passionate readers and self-educators and, being Marxist, intellectuals. In other respects it was notably different. Though constantly ...”

“... as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page. But in the background a larger subject looms ...”

“... therefore, was it that the country which before 1914 seemed ideally suited to produce a working-class political party committed to socialism failed to do so? McKibbin’s answer, roughly speaking, is that the British working class had both a high degree of autonomy within the accepted institutions of Late Victorian and ...”

“... words such as ‘doctrine’ or ‘ideology’. Where the belief and the propaganda of a ruling class differ significantly, that class becomes the victim of a cynicism which penetrates throughout society. It is generally assumed that a contradiction of this kind between belief and propaganda represents an ideological ...”

“... in London. Worse, she had lived much of her life against the backdrop of the squalid sectarian war in ‘the North’, which had run a coach and horses through that tradition. Enda Delaney’s sensitive study, The Irish in Postwar Britain, tells the story of my grandmother’s generation of migrants. It’s a story of hardship and neglect but also of ...”

“... provoked a massive assemblage of what people had actually said in the course of the Second World War. It was as though these voices had been held back for half a century and were now bursting out. Martin Gilbert in The Day the War Ended, a recent account of the year 1945, showed how inexorably this could happen. In ...”