Search Results

“... by what is called Essex Man, the self-seeking, self-aggrandising, uncultured, upper-working class to ex-working class. Hammond is not, in fact, in himself any of those things. He is quite a long way to the left and liberal side of a representative beneficiary of Essex thinking like the Conservative MP David ...”

“... this –with the interesting exception of Jerusalem’s Clara Maugham from Up North and uncertain class status, whose hair we never find out about. My hair was fine and mousy and fluffy and frizzy. You could do something about it, as I did, by ironing it (really, with an iron in those pre-straightener days) every morning between 1963 and 1968. There was the ...”

“... How did the Great War – the first total war – affect the class structure of English society? An exhaustive answer, as Bernard Waites recognises, is probably beyond the power of any one historian. The difficulty is that class structure, or ‘social differentiation’, is something which, unlike crime or illegitimacy or whooping cough, defies both definition and statistical analysis ...”

“... simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times defending Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and signed by all or most of those present). One had to pretend that Britain was a country where it was dangerous to hold conservative opinions. So that a sample sally might begin, ‘I know it’s unfashionable to say this’ and go on to propose ...”

“... waste and absurdity of the TSR2. He brought what appeared to be an aging and respectable working-class audience to a delirium of delight. He laughed at the new technocratic Tory leader, Heath, just as he laughed at the ‘ancestral voices’ of Heath’s predecessor, the 14th Earl of Home. The whole place resounded to his humour and his confidence. It was ...”

“... Hue in 1968, seems to want to get us into focus through his half-closed eyes. (This was the only war composition that McCullin ‘contrived’, he explains, by scattering the man’s possessions on the ground beside him: souvenir snaps of his family, a few folded pages of what might be a letter and a drawstring bag full of bullets.) When we can’t tell from ...”

“... was not an unchanging group. Inherited wealth could be dissipated by pleasure, or destroyed by war; new wealth could be created, as the orator Lysias’ father made a fortune in armaments. It may even be true that Greeks tended to regard material prosperity as a matter of luck. Nonetheless, it was hard having money when the poor ruled the roost. In the ...”

“... estate in Bukovina in 1914. Bukovina was Austrian in those days, Romanian after the First World War, and Russian after the second. The Rezzoris were minor Austrian gentry administering the outposts of empire, more like the British in India than like the magnates who entertained Patrick Leigh-Fermor when he passed through the Balkans. There was Italian blood ...”

“... majority of the international community; or seemingly contrary to some of the basic needs of the war against terrorism. It is all of these things, but they are of no great concern to the hardline nationalists in the Administration. This group has suffered at least a temporary check as a result of the British insistence on UN involvement, and Saddam ...”

“... by artificial Soviet-era borders, a tinderbox ready to ignite. This view emerged during the Cold War, but it has taken on new life since the Soviet collapse. Those who hold it argue that the ‘national-territorial delimitation’ of 1924, which transformed tsarist Turkestan into a series of nominally nation-based republics, represented a cynical attempt at ...”

“... us in income per head. In his magisterial new history of the economic policies of the post-war Labour Government, Sir Alec Cairncross shows that our industrial production was larger than that of France and Germany combined. It was 50 per cent above the 1938 figure, compared with 20 per cent in France and 10 per cent in Germany. France and Germany ...”

“... The English Civil War occupies a strange niche in contemporary memory. To all official appearances, no episode of the country’s modern past is so parenthetical. Leaving no reputable trace in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche ...”

“... who spent her days counting other people’s sneezes.’ And now we are in the world of middle-class control, eavesdropping and gossiping. The unseemly vitality of the sneeze. The little old lady gets her comeuppance in a cloud of black pepper cast from a victim’s window.When war came, Rodari was too small and sickly ...”

“... fifty years ago: Sebastian Haffner’s tremendous Failure of a Revolution. Haffner, who spent the war in Britain, returned to West Germany in the 1960s to become the giant of left-wing but non-Marxist commentary. When his book was first published in German in 1969, it bore the title Die Verratene Revolution – the betrayed revolution – an adjective much ...”

“... were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social inferiors,’ Wildeblood replied; but the war was over and with it the Bakhtinian moment of misrule when the strings of degree were untuned and, to ...”