Search Results

“... In Kansas and other states in the American heartland, economic class conflict (poor farmers and blue-collar workers versus lawyers, bankers, large companies) has been transposed into an opposition between honest, hard-working, Christian Americans on the one hand, and decadent latte-drinking liberals who drive foreign cars, mock patriotism and advocate abortion and homosexuality on the other: so Thomas Frank argues in What’s the Matter with America? The main economic interest of populist conservatism is to get rid of the strong state, which taxes the population in order to finance regulatory interventions, and to introduce an economic programme whose slogan might be ‘less tax, fewer regulations ...”

“... retirement. Even strenuous pursuit of intellectual truth, at which some at least of the leisured class once excelled, is now no longer trusted and admired unless practised on a salary with a research assistant in a seat of higher learning. What does this paradoxical transformation signify, and how has it come about? Why do we reject the Victorian work ...”

“... In a review, 22 years ago, of my history of the Spanish Civil War, Malcolm Muggeridge concluded that the one merit of the book was that no one would want to go into the disagreeable matter again. That proved over-optimistic. Since then, there has been a flood of memoirs, monographs and reconsiderations. After 1970, it enveloped Spain ...”

“... of Whig historians Englishness is now a matter of the shrill nativism of a forgotten white working class, and the pained nostalgia of the elderly, who can remember a straight-faced version of our ‘island’ story. Even if England has never been an island, a vagueness about the contours of its political geography was for centuries a core ingredient of the ...”

“... August​ in Japan is a month for remembering war. Ceremonies marking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) are followed by a commemoration of Japan’s surrender to the Allies on 15 August. More than three million Japanese were killed in what is variously called the Pacific War, the Fifteen-Year War or the Greater East Asia War, depending on one’s view of history ...”

“... and the whole party was nothing but a confederacy directed against the traditional ruling class. Their leader, Mr Gladstone, was a dangerous old man and a firebrand at heart, and after him worse would surely follow. On the left of the Party, where the real crackpots and doctrinaires gathered, stood the lean, arrogant and transparently ambitious figure ...”

“... dim memories of 1926; the feeling that in Britain perhaps there was never a peace treaty in the class war, just a truce; that the country, split more than ever into two nations by the recession, is evolving in ways that nobody can predict; the first tremors of an earthquake that might merely dislodge a few tiles from the roof – but could also shake ...”

“... situation in Athens at the time: the conservatives were the well-heeled and well-established upper-class aristocrats and landowners. These old political families had never felt entirely happy with the post-Cleisthenic democracy, and regarded Cleisthenes himself as a traitor to his class: not surprisingly, since his extension ...”

“... come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling class on whose behalf we used to be told we fought the First World War, and seems to have suffered from a near-terminal vagueness and languor. Mama, in bold contrast, possessed a sense of noblesse oblige that the Koch de ...”

“... was highly probable. The speed with which the deep divisions within Liberal ranks over the Boer War were healed was entirely due to the incompetence of their opponents. Saddled with the Dear Loaf and Rome on the Rates, with Chinese Slavery and Taff Vale, with Randlords and Landlords, Unionist candidates in constituency after constituency went down to ...”