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“... concomitant economic growth that began in the mid-1970s encouraged the formation of a new middle class, which steadied the political pendulum by filling the gap between the warring left and right. Education rather than capital accumulation lifted people into the middle tiers of the social pyramid and, since the public sector is the main employer of the ...”

“... Sivanandan, began his essay ‘All That Melts into Air Is Solid’, published in 1990 in Race and Class, the institute’s house journal, ‘dedicated to those friends with whom, out of a different loyalty, I must now openly disagree.’* He was wrong, I think, to impute that Hall and his comrades were writing in bad faith, but otherwise, bang on then and ...”

“... cost. Rita Fitzgerald, scion of a Castle Catholic Dublin family in the years of the Irish war of independence, marries Frank O’Fiaich, Eamon de Valera’s right-hand man, and becomes embroiled in a plot to finance the Irish revolution with the Romanov crown jewels. (Like many a fabular event in Irish history, this one is conceivably true.) The ...”

“... led him to chronicle the mass of humankind, but rather what Harvey Kaye calls the ‘machinery of class domination’. In particular, he has explored the ideas and processes by which governing classes rule and are themselves regulated. Duelling, for him, represents ‘a burden imposed on itself by the élite as the gage of its right to be considered a higher ...”

“... Whitehouse wrote to one of her supporters. They knew what was good, based on a solid lower-middle-class education intent mostly on reproducing the status quo, and they trusted that what they had been told by teachers and preachers was true. Shakespeare was good, and so, someone must have said, was Strindberg. There was no need to mess with what was officially ...”

“... book which will appeal especially to those interested in the history and mythography of the Great War. When war broke out Haggard was in Canada as a member of the Dominions Royal Commission, inquiring into natural resources and trade. He decided to keep a diary of public events to help him write a history of the ...”

“... In Theory of War, Joan Brady reveals a little-known piece of American history that has dominated her own life. In the chaos after the Civil War, white children, the sons and daughters of impoverished widows, of ragged soldiers, were sold into virtual slavery. Black slaves – who had been expensive – had just been liberated ...”

“... and of social hierarchy. For example, he also examines the impact of commercialism on working-class leisure activities – circuses, music-halls, sport – showing how it reconfigured but did not erode class distinctions. The chapter on ‘The Business of Culture’ takes an unsentimental look at literature, music and ...”

“... superlative consumer of his own propaganda. Whether Henry’s subjects shared his affection for war is, as Steven Gunn’s book shows, less certain. War was, however, central to the English experience, both in the practical sense that armies were sent frequently into battle, but also in the more amorphous sense that ...”

“... eloquence all the more arresting. Johnston’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbour he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he took up his post ...”

“... married life had promised, and partly, Herzog suggests, because of the instinctive cupidity of her class, pursues him through the courts until he’s all but penniless. For all that Herzog accuses her of being out of touch with reality, her litigious skill far surpasses his. On the back flap of Michael Hofmann’s new edition, My First Wife is pitched as ‘a ...”

“... Administration, with an obligation to prevent political patronage – the curse of the Civil War pension scheme – as well as to protect the scheme’s financial viability and to propose improvements. The existence of the SSA has limited the erosion of public pensions in the United States; in Britain, there is no such independent body. Blackburn is ...”

“... of what she dimly recalled writing to her husband while he was at the Front in the First World War and was assembled from working-class epistolary Lego: ‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me’ etc.My grandfather committed suicide in 1957. A dour, uncommunicative man, reputedly with a violent temper in early life, his ...”

“... Robert Chandler writes: ‘Life and Fate is the true War and Peace of this century, the most complete portrait of Stalinist Russia that we have or are ever likely to have.’ Chandler, who has had the herculean task of making a good translation of this long, moving and very remarkable novel, puts forward that claim in his Introduction ...”