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“... of employment in schools, offices and town halls made it possible for single women of the middle class to escape the bleak alternatives posed by Early Victorian England – being a governess or remaining dependent on the parental family – and an increasing number of flats and restaurants catered to their new needs. At the same time, it appears that in all ...”

“... conscience. But Christianity never entered the marrow. His personal journey from upper-middle-class norms to committed socialism was similarly tentative. Indeed, its point of departure was militaristic public school loyalty. In October 1905 Attlee and his brother Laurence – out of a sense of duty to their former school – visited the Haileybury Club in ...”

“... entrée. Even the Russian novel cannot get in, as it was able to do without effort in the days of War and Peace and Resurrection, following the novels of Balzac and Scott. A contemporary novel like Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat uses the old tradition, alternating domestic and family matters with scenes in the Kremlin and among the Soviet bigwigs. But the ...”

“... the history of the Communist movement can properly be understood, particularly in its pre-Cold War heyday. About Turn is a tough book to read, even for those of us who maintain a perverse fascination with the affairs of the British Communist Party (and what a surprisingly large number of us there are – a further sign of Communism’s many-sided ...”

“... was by contrast very approachable and friendly, ‘a tough old Clydeside revolutionary’ and a war hero with a partly wooden foot and a special medal, who had educated himself into ‘a passionate interest in literature’. When the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s ...”

“... not mean that it is wrong. There are good arguments for it, the strongest of which come from just-war theory. If you accept that wars fought as a last resort by legitimate authority with the sole intention of responding to unprovoked aggression with proportionate force are justifiable, then there are circumstances in which you may find yourself supporting ...”

“... one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in the ...”

“... ago. His Berlin family belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum – roughly, the well-educated middle class – and rejected Hitler and National Socialism from the very first moment. They were not part of any resistance group; they did nothing ‘active’ to damage the Nazi dictatorship. They simply refused to let this dirty, vulgar, evil thing across the ...”

“... Asked by a number of interviewers to talk about their childhoods in England before the First World War, they offer notes on families, schools and factories, on nursery teas and crocheting and ringworm. They talk a little about their feelings, less about their fantasies. Collected together to make a bag of recollections, their observations are presented less as ...”

“... him delivering a speech, surrounded by attentive miners. It was here that Jaurès first saw class struggle at close quarters, in the miners’ strike of 1892. Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, the leader of the miners’ union, was sacked from his job after being elected town mayor, on the pretext that his duties meant he was missing too much work. The miners ...”

“... and was worried about finding work. I had another reason for applying: France seemed to be at war with itself, and schools were the battleground. The papers talked about violent classrooms and complacent teachers. One word in vogue was islamo-gauchisme, or ‘Islamo-leftism’, a dangerous brand of thinking that supposedly combined multiculturalism and ...”

“... Denis MacShane’s recent book* and raises very wide questions about patterns of working-class revolt, and the role of intellectuals, in Eastern Europe since the arrival of the people’s democracies – questions which will not disappear whatever the fate of Solidarity. Ascherson argues the essential unity of the Polish nation, in contrast with the ...”

“... when Communism was high fashion among young intellectuals. The decisive influence in each case was war. Not, however, the same war. Born in 1895, and Philby’s senior by 16 years, Sorge belonged to the generation that would shortly be plunged into the Kaiser’s great miscalculation. Three days after the ...”

“... and is filled with desire to join ‘the masses’. Finally, she puts herself and her class on trial and affirms her own metamorphosis: ‘How much has changed over these 13 years, both within me and around me! Life has been reborn and I have been reborn.’ In the end, she came to regard the Soviet regime as the sole legitimate repository of the ...”

“... first memory of him lingers in my cells as located in a Cambridge college, Caius, just after the war, and after lunch, over coffee. Two undergraduates were there, Neal Ascherson and myself, and someone academically senior but disinclined to pull rank: this was Eric, lean, fair-haired, Jewish-looking, German-looking, lumber-shirted, trousers arrested by a ...”