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“... Marxist, he revived the bourgeois critique of slavery most closely associated with Adam Smith. The class conflict that might have driven the history of the South was stifled, he argued, by the slave owners’ paternalism towards their slaves and by their hegemony over farmers who did not own slaves. Yet there was no mistaking his Marxism: at a time when most ...”

“... of things, that she represented. A few years later, I enjoyed trying to explain to the Class of ’68 at Sussex University that there was no necessary connection between lived experience and being politically right-on; that history and politics needed more subtle explanatory devices than the simple sketch-maps of ...”

“... prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman ate so much that he ballooned to twenty stone.The ruling class was free to behave in this appalling way, Heffer asserts, because of ‘the decline of the spiritual’, though he doesn’t have much to say about it. The middle classes were left free to ape materialist aristocratic values, typified by Mr Pooter, and ...”

“... the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a man of anti-clerical views, his mother a devout Catholic who ensured that her son became an altar boy. Jacques, a tall, painfully thin boy, left school early to become a factory worker in St ...”

“... they see flabby morals and flagging virtue. Children? We used to punish them for whispering in class, now they come to school with guns. Families? No one wants to get married any more, except the gays. Government? Never so bloated and corrupt. Our allies? Never so pusillanimous or venal. It’s quite a trick to seize power in every corner of American ...”

“... point of being above the political battle (mind you, I wrote the original version during the Cold War, when there was still a political battle to be above). So it’s not in my nature to come out as a revolutionary enthusiast. But shouldn’t someone do it? That person, as it turns out, is China Miéville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist ...”

“... political allies. All the confrontations that gave the period an atmosphere of impending civil war – the coast-to-coast railroad strikes of 1877, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, the Homestead Strike against the Carnegie Steel Company in 1892, the Pullman strike of 1894 – ended in bloodshed. Between 1877 and 1903 federal troops and state militias were ...”

“... victory and its consequence, an astounding surge in the self-confidence of the British working class, was a lesson to Tom Mann all his life. He saw how the workers, in the course of their own action, changed from hopeless down-and-outs into enthusiastic, disciplined and rational human beings. It was a change, he reckoned, worth fighting for. Tom Mann ...”

“... Western Europe to realise just what it was like in the years immediately after the Second World War. In Britain, conditions were, if anything, even more stringent than they had been during the war itself. Rationing of most things was severe and after each balance of payments crisis became even more severe. Indeed, the ...”

“... but then it can certainly be argued that the Welfare State is the principal flower in the post-war blossoming of Western Europe. Moreover, the speaker presumably intended to place the modern Welfare State among the greatest achievements of European civilisation, an order transcending frontiers. To talk about the Welfare State in this fashion is to use the ...”

“... Law League; and a minority honoured his uncompromising and frequently unpopular opposition to war: ‘seldom has hero rested, stained by so superb a fault.’ A special train was laid on from London to take the great and the good to his funeral; William Gladstone helped to carry his coffin; statues were raised by public subscription; and the London and ...”

“... were Bright and Cobden’s habitual explanation for the unaccountable failure of the middle class to perform the historic role for which they had cast it. It is the merit of G.R. Searle’s study to show that matters were more complicated than that. Deference apart, there is a well-rehearsed string of reasons for the failure of the middle classes to ...”