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“... of seats in each of the constituent parts of Great Britain – as it has since the Second World War. The Lib Dems won nearly a quarter of the votes (more than last time) but only 57 seats (five fewer than last time). The Labour and Conservative Parties are now in effect regional parties. Labour is the party of the inner cities (London included) and ...”

“... Piketty dwells particularly on the intrusion of warfare: ‘To a large extent, it was the chaos of war, with its attendant economic and political shocks, that reduced inequality in the 20th century.’ His book is also something of a throwback in its mode of address. A clear and sometimes sarcastically witty writer (noting that the parents of Harvard students ...”

“... suit and cap. Lenton was one of many suffragette fugitives who remained in hiding until the war brought them amnesty. Like their feminist forebears, suffrage historians have tended to take sides, for or against militancy. Jill Liddington’s influential first book, One Hand Tied behind Us, written with Jill Norris, and published in 1978, offered a ...”

“... By spring 1940 France and Britain had been at war with Germany for more than six months; Belgium was already occupied by the Nazis. On 9 June some fifty divisions Of the German Army under von Rundstedt, a commander so formidable that even Hitler is said to have treated him with considerable respect, struck southwards from Belgium towards Rheims ...”

“... Last year a BBC documentary about the war in Bosnia showed the town of Travnik besieged by Bosnian Serbs. Conditions in the town were dismal; hunger and fortitude were the order of the day. The programme was watched by 1.8 million viewers, none more attentive than a Mrs Willis of Bath, who wrote to the broadcasters complaining about the amount of smoking in the programme ...”

“... and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries. One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently ...”

“... of the mid-19th-century European imagination as are Middlemarch, L’Education Sentimentale, and War and Peace. Whatever it was that condemned Galdos to international neglect, it was certainly not insularity of outlook. For British readers the case is particularly ironic. The author of Fortunata and Jacinta modelled himself on Balzac and Scott and on his ...”

“... the usual lazy caricature of the sour-faced, high-minded left. He is easily irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts ...”

“... life – everyone watching everyone else. Gossip is saturated with disapproval, resentment, class hierarchy; everybody’s ranked according to their job, their education, which church they go to, what their family name betrays about them. Some celebrate ancestors who came over with the Pilgrims, others are Irish Catholics, or ...”

“... Like many other political scientists and historians, they refer back to the ‘post-war consensus’, an era in which, supposedly, Conservatives of the One Nation school were at one with Labour in upholding a social democratic settlement. This view is now vigorously disputed by critics, who claim that British politics were always polarised ...”

“... chronicles of his wasted time in the farce of paying agents in Lorenço Marques during the war? Perhaps Cyril Connolly said the last word on the spy story when in ‘Bond strikes camp’ he pictured 007 being nearly seduced by a C monstrously attired in drag. The spy story continues to flourish, but no longer do upper-...”

“... the Blue Division, a unit of volunteers who served with the Nazis during the Second World War. In Andalusía there is a roadside restaurant called Casa Pepe, stacked from floor to ceiling with Francoist and Falangist flags, pictures and other memorabilia – it even stocks olive oil and cava in bottles stamped with Franco’s image. Reíllo, a village ...”

“... Villalobos had addressed a similarly ecstatic crowd in San Salvador’s central plaza. The war was over; the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, had forced the government to negotiate a settlement. The victory was far from complete. The right was still in power, 70,000 people had died and economic reform hadn’t been mentioned in the ...”

“... age and its ‘engineers’, and the (decline of the) culture of modernism and its ‘new class’. (Some of the 17 essays are about socio-political analysis, but they are less strikingly original.) It is worth noting that the twenty years straddle what may well be one of the most significant periods of change in modern times: the évènements de ...”