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“... out in Panama, but he was dispatched a month later by US troops in Washington’s first post-Cold War invasion. There was still Fidel Castro, but Cuba was isolated, having lost its Soviet Bloc trading partners. By June 1990, Bush père could claim that a ‘rising tide of democracy, never before witnessed in this beloved hemisphere’ would soon make possible ...”

“... historic ruling party. They are now mired as Labour was in the 1930s, and it took the Second World War to get Labour out of the mire. In some senses the Labour vote is also alarmingly low: but it is remarkably efficient. Not many votes are needed to elect a Labour MP. The Conservative performance was not uniformly bad: they did well, for instance, in ...”

“... Left 8.30 a.m. for Sandown High School where from 9.15 to 11, talked to sixth-form Spanish/French class about the Civil War and Surrealism. Went on to pick up Hilda and Edward Upward and take them out to lunch at a Shanklin restaurant. They’re not so indignant about Bush and the war as ...”

“... American films about the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told ...”

“... or Alexander, or Stonewall Jackson, by far the most talented commander of the American Civil War. To them it was – or became – like a drug, an addiction that could not be given up. Had he lived, Alexander might have invaded Italy through the Balkans, or attacked Carthage and Spain along the African coast, anticipating the Arab invasions of eight ...”

“... and “serious” person you knew – left or right – was for the war.’ ‘I am not a radical,’ Coates said. Even so he found it ‘searing’ to watch ‘reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster’. In retrospect, the most remarkable of these reasonable people were not the neoconservatives but the liberals ...”

“... had to know him well to get an inkling of that. More obviously he was handsome, dandyish, an upper-class socialist. He liked cricket, bridge (with, among others, the ‘Machiavellian’ David Sylvester), chess (with Martin Amis, who felt humbly as if he always had, or anyway always ought to have, the black pieces). Women found him instantly attractive. And he ...”

“... capitalist world system of oppression and plunder whose inherent instability had caused the Great War. Lenin’s text came to many of us in the Indian provinces as an exhilarating revelation. No amount of praise appeared sufficient for the Soviet leader who had pre-empted Wilson in calling for national self-determination. Hadn’t he exposed the secret ...”

“... degradation of Tredegar between the wars, but just young enough to have benefited from the post-war Welfare State and the Sixties expansion of higher education. (A typical product of that expansion, who was able to pick up qualifications casually and without exertion while concentrating his energies on rugby and the Students’ Union, he is far less well ...”

“... to labour comes at a time when its collective voice is more subdued than at any point since the war. Except for the rather embattled organisations which the British unions belong to, either individually or through the TUC – the International Labour Organisation, the international trade-union secretariats, the trade-union committee of the OECD and the ...”

“... the legislation that comes before it turns those MPs, as Gordon Brown has pointed out, into second-class citizens. It would also effectively end the Union – a paradoxical result of a referendum that supposedly preserved it. The Labour Party’s structure and loyalties were a product of the United Kingdom and its decline has left the party almost ...”

“... incident; polls put the imperial family’s popularity at its highest level since the Second World War. Credit for this belongs to Japan’s 125th emperor, Akihito, who abdicated last April after thirty years on the throne.During the postwar part of the Showa era, as Hirohito’s reign is known in Japan, the emperor was a politically divisive figure, reviled ...”

“... because those ‘falsities’ deprive Americans of any ‘legitimate language for talking about class’ and thus make it ‘all but impossible’ to ‘talk about class inequality’. What makes this second argument controversial is that ‘attacks on the use of race as a concept’ appear to anti-racist writers like ...”

“... and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with plays by John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, these books inspired a New Wave British cinema which during the early 1960s ...”

“... African town of Mafeking, where British troops were besieged for seven months in the Second Boer War: ‘all hemmed in with no road out and a bad road to get in’.After the First World War, a Durham council report on Ludworth’s pit cottages remarked that it was ‘painful to look upon these houses as the general outlook ...”