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“... lifetimes, while the institutions that had seemed to frame their destiny at birth, the empire, the class system and marriage, came to count for much less. In some ways that made them fortunate, witnesses to if not participants in the forward march of emancipation. Yet in others they were particularly unlucky. As old certainties broke down behind them, the new ...”

“... Islamists formed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), led by Abassi Madani, a veteran of the war of independence, and his fiery young deputy, Ali Benhadj, who delivered violent sermons against ‘the thieves of the FLN’ at the al-Sunna mosque in Bab el Oued, a working-class quarter of Algiers that became a hotbed of ...”

“... Sure. But ‘simple’? Really? Her account of her experiences during the Second World War is as horrifying as you would expect – she witnessed, and endured, unimaginable suffering and depravity – though the prevailing mode of her book is a destabilising irony. And the story of how she came to be in Dachau by her own deliberate choice is ...”

“... The doctrine of resistance, which had hitherto threatened rulers, now threatened the ruling class. In 1808 Francis Jeffrey, writing in the Whig Edinburgh Review, lamented that it had become ‘unfashionable, and not very popular, to talk of the tyranny of the Stuarts, and the triumph of the Revolution, in the tone that was universal and established ...”

“... Hokkien Chinese suffix-of-politeness for males: it shows that she belongs to that Chinese-mestizo class, blooming between the 1760s and 1850s, which has largely monopolised political power in the islands in modern times.1 Important as American influence has been since 1900, it has served primarily to reinforce a social system and cultural order which is ...”

“... Nesta Skrine, in Newbridge, County Kildare in 1904, the third child of Walter Skrine, an upper-class Englishman from Bath, and Agnes ‘Nesta’ Shakespeare Higginson, who came from an austere unionist family in Antrim and was better known as the Celtic Revival poet Moira O’Neill. (Versions of the dour Antrim aunts with whom the Skrine children were sent ...”

“... During the Spanish Civil War the Communist Party established a stranglehold over the Republican Government and Army. They were able to do this for many reasons. First, they could present themselves as the collaborators of the Soviet Union, the chief provider of armaments. They acted as agents for the International Brigades ...”

“... devoted to a single subject and are written by a single author. Both are concerned with working-class life in that area to the north and east of Liverpool Street Station, extending in an arc from Bethnal Green via Spitalfields to Whitechapel, famous in its day for such do-badding criminals as Jack the Ripper, and for such do-gooding enterprises as Toynbee ...”

“... and connubium. In Western societies they have operated within the cultural framework of class. Kenneth Ballhatchet takes the equally familiar notion that in colonial societies alien minority rule translated class distinctions into those of race. In India he sees the social aloofness of the ruling white minority as ...”

“... a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the course of some fifty years. From the perspective, by turns, of parents and children, she contemplated the complexities and banalities of relations among family members against the political background of the ...”

“... In the chilly spring of 1958, with war still a vivid memory and rationing an even more recent one, queues were a familiar sight. But the line that formed in front of the railings of Buckingham Palace on 18 March was peculiar enough to attract a small crowd of onlookers. There, shivering in silk and chiffon, the debutantes waited with their mothers and fathers to curtsey to the queen ...”

“... In the lustrum after World War Two the word ‘commitment’ got almost as much work as ‘existential’ in literary magazines. The words represented opposite attitudes to the writer’s stance in relation to the world around him. A literary existentialist owed a little, but not much, to Kierkegaard’s belief in the free and responsible individual discovering his spiritual essence through acts of will ...”

“... Hitchens, in his attack upon me, says that I regretted the defeat of Germany in the Second World War. On the contrary, in my view the greatest tragedy for us would have been the defeat of our own country. My opposition to the war in 1939 was based on the fact, as obvious to many people then as it is to everyone now, that ...”

“... to place that euphoria more firmly than we did at the time in the context of the Second World War. We were the children of that war. And it was the direness of the 1950s for women, another backlash after the war’s liberating potential, which precipitated the feminism that was to ...”

“... the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. In April, the House of Commons responded by voting for war with France. Initially, that war, which would continue intermittently for much of the next century, was fought in Ireland. The campaigns of 1689-91 bequeathed to modern Ireland many of its most important lieux de ...”