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“... eludes them.’ By Victorian ‘politics’ Armstrong means far more than conflicts of party and class. Her understanding of the term includes struggles over sexuality, epistemology, science and theology; and the lines of affiliation and influence she traces among the participants are subtly entangled and shifting. Though there are occasions when her ...”

“... and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition ...”

“... Review Orwell reported that when the authorities tore down railings for scrap they ravaged working-class parks and squares but left upper-class ones alone. When his wife pointed out that this allegation was demonstrably false, he answered that it was ‘essentially true’, rather as he accused pacifists of being ...”

“... scientific approval or dismissal: the irony of the human sciences is that human beings have waged war against each other in their name and that some people have been victims of those sciences. In no other area does this possibility loom larger than in studies of heredity, which have too often taken the form of studies of degeneration where the full nastiness ...”

“... be used of the 15,000 or so Jews who attempted to remain undiscovered in Nazi Germany during the war – they called themselves ‘U-Boats’. Half of them were in Berlin, and of those only 1700 would make it to the end of the war. ‘You are going to be the only one of us to survive,’ Jalowicz’s friend Nora said as ...”

“... years dissenters are more likely to fly the flag than besmirch it. Protesters against the war in Iraq, adopting the slogan ‘peace is patriotic,’ often carry the flag; and two years ago advocates of immigrant rights, many of them non-citizens, waved it in massive demonstrations and pledged allegiance in Spanish. Of the various iconic ...”

“... capitalist/socialist economy. From 1921 to 1929, after winning a bitter and devastating civil war, the Bolsheviks retreated temporarily from their goals of nationalisation and collectivisation and allowed private land ownership and a free-market agriculture. In 1929 the position changed abruptly when the party leadership decided on a radically leftist ...”

“... domestic violence, the petty and grand humiliations of racism, poverty, illness and genocidal war, but they don’t give up on life – it’s rather that the problems are their life, and interesting in themselves if held in the hand, as it were, at a short distance. Difficulties are to be expected, and you don’t get to choose their scale, only your ...”

“... actors to show off their wares, the Royal Court revolution was an assertion of the lower middle class, the unfashionable, the provincial and the direct, against the feyness, falsity and snobbery of a sclerotically self-regarding West End. However, as Rebellato points out, there was another fault-line dividing the West End from the Royal Court ...”

“... as personifying ‘a new sort of “young generation”, the lyric poet of the New York working class, of the strike front, the writer of sketches that bite into the memory’. Born in London in 1911 to a Jewish family that emigrated to the US when he was three, Hayes left school in 1929, the year of the Crash. His father, a barber and a bookmaker, wanted ...”

“... This feeling expressed hatred accumulated over the centuries, the bitterness of three years of war, and the hysteria generated by the revolutionary leaders.’ Lenin’s slogan ‘Loot the looters!’ encouraged but did not create this hatred and envy. The poor derived their own satisfaction from the process of destroying and despoiling the ...”

“... For him, Clemenceau was ‘the man who led them’ – the ordinary soldiers of the First World War – ‘and their allies’ (who does Dallas have in mind?) ‘to victory in 1918. And a victory it certainly was.’ No it wasn’t: 1914-18 was a disaster all around, and so was Clemenceau’s handiwork – the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The break-up of the ...”

“... b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They also had parallel lives as spies, soldiers, shaggers and men of action (or in Connolly’s case, of inaction so spectacular that ...”

“... religious toleration, and an end to dynastic conflict. Fortunate, too, in that its dominant landed class was open to new ideas and new recruits, and understood how to concede its power gracefully and in time. And fortunate, finally, because its pioneering Industrial Revolution had furthered the already substantial prosperity and social mobility of its ...”

“... anyone who has ever been a foreign correspondent will admit that Waugh’s dreadful pack of war reporters is all too realistic. Indeed, the book has given journalists a phrase which they have adopted as their own. ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ we say to each other whenever one of our number is getting the wrong end of the journalistic stick. Not ...”