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“... grandfather built ships for the Nazis. My mother, who was born in 1937, told us stories about the war at bedtime. She used to argue with my brother about the degree of her father’s complicity. Part of the heat of these arguments came from the fact that our father is Jewish, from New York, and his family gave him hell for marrying a Christian from ...”

“... development the ‘shorter 20th century’ had managed to generate a new relatively advantaged class, which aspired to something a lot better. Civil society seemed to have got way ahead of itself, for socio-economic reasons, yet lacked any correspondingly new political forms: it was rebellious yet formless. The resultant disorientation gave the old world ...”

“... between the two games go beyond the question of payment. There has always been an element of class struggle in their mutual antipathy. Union has its roots in the middle-class South of England: its players are largely professional men and its administrators products of the days of empire, whereas League, born in the ...”

“... be mild: slightly pained but not alarmed. English people old enough to remember the Second World War often said: ‘Seems a pity after all we’ve been through together. But it’s their right, isn’t it?’ Nobody seemed to have given much thought to the value of the union. This April, 40 per cent of a UK sample – which means an even higher percentage of ...”

“... decision to stay in America than any large reflections upon the state of the world, the impending war, or his position as a coterie poet in London. Still, his experience in America showed Auden that he could live more freely in New York than in London, and elude the demands upon him which issued from his being leader of the English band. American readers ...”

“... of debate about the reasons for this descent into violence. Writing after the Second World War, Marxist historians like Georges Lefebvre understood the Terror of 1793-94 as a matter of national survival. By 1792, France faced invasion by the Austrian and Prussian armies; royalist insurgencies in Brittany, Lyon and the Vendée; defection among senior ...”

“... the only branch of Weimar literature that broke out of the Central European enclosure was the anti-war fiction of the late 1920s, headed by Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Naturally, it was filmed by Universal, the only Hollywood studio headed by a native German. What, looking back, was so characteristic about the culture of a shortlived German ...”

“... I am satisfied the war is over,’ declared N.K. Sharma, the World Health Organisation representative in India. Certainly the war against the plague has disappeared from the newspapers and the airwaves. Business India, the fortnightly gospel of the country’s burgeoning corporate sector, questioned whether there had been a plague epidemic at all ...”

“... and those questions are ones that I find troubling. I was born, not long before the Second World War, in the United States, where until the age of nine I lived in a succession of different towns and states, of which New York was the last, the place from which I left the country for good. I didn’t know at the time that we weren’t going back; and it was ...”

“... 1911 Official Secrets Act (‘the actual change in the law is slight,’ claimed the Secretary for War, quite disingenuously); but the Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934 runs it pretty close. That was presented as nothing more than a tidying up of the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act, and as offering ‘an easier, swifter and more suitable remedy and ...”

“... history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests between large and small tenants as much as the struggle against the landlord oppressor, and casting a cold eye on the cloak of unity that nationalist historiography ...”

“... Of these, some have footnotes, some don’t. Of three ‘extended chapters’ on mock-heroic and war, ‘which in a sense form the core of the book’, two (‘approximately half the book’) are largely new and elaborately documented. The purpose of this disjointedness: to ‘capture and analyse stress points’ in a design better adapted to nuance, it is ...”

“... a bibliography, which takes up half the pages. Still, there are some handsome pictures on first-class paper, the result of a collaboration between the Oxford University Press and the Pierpont Morgan Library. There are also 25 essays, some of them lazily written but four of them, at least, rather good. Three of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of ...”

“... recognition. The prevailing tone had scarcely changed since the founding historian of modern Civil War studies, the Victorian S.R. Gardiner, dismissed their adherents as wild eccentrics who lacked a ‘sense of decorum’. Now even those who take against them can’t ignore them. Hill has had a lasting semantic victory too. Como’s Radical Parliamentarians ...”