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“... from socialist revolution. Severe stresses and tensions remained, but the clear trend before the war was towards co-operation and integration.’ This had been made possible by reforms going back to the 1860s. After the serfs were emancipated in 1861, the government set up zemstvos, elective local government assemblies; it created independent law courts; it ...”

“... for the rights and hopes of the House of Stuart, [fallen] on Crecy’s field in the Hundred Years War, and [taken] part in all the great campaigns since then.’ As if that was not enough, all Patton’s warrior forebears materialised at moments of crisis to lend him moral support. After leading an attack on the Western Front in World ...”

“... to acknowledge that he had been elected to implement a socialist programme. In our own era of post-class politics, this may sound grandiloquent and out of place, but at the time it seemed natural. Many books have been written in French about Mitterrand, but only half a dozen in English; this impressive biography by Philip Short, a BBC correspondent in Paris in ...”

“... on to power than the Liberal-Country Party coalition found it after 1949. Australia ended World War Two with a Labor government, but there was no post-war urge in Australia, as there was in Britain, to create an all-embracing welfare state – partly because its welfare policies were already well advanced. The ...”

“... Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social and political impact than C. Vann Woodward, whose books and essays concerned the nation’s most enduring problem, racial ...”

“... and bilateral) over the late colonial period in Algeria and France’s undeclared war against the independence movement.Most of Macron’s interventions concede a point of principle in parts of the world where, in practice, France has single-mindedly pursued its economic interests. But Israel is a separate matter, despite its resemblance to ...”

“... rehearse the privileges of working for superior families before 1914; ‘surplus’ women with war experience live together in practical and possibly more intimate arrangements; middle-aged village stalwarts organise bring-and-buy sales and fundraisers for the Conservatives, haggle over the flower-arranging in church and fuss over the curates.Not all are ...”

“... change. African writers seemed to be more interested in writing novels that reflected their middle-class lives and concerns. Adichie grew up on a university campus: her father was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and her mother was its first female registrar. These writers didn’t ignore politics: Adichie’s first novel, Purple ...”

“... singles out ‘Leavisites’ as the chief culprits. Leavis himself could certainly be a world-class sniper and caviller, but when, having read this biography, I returned to some of his celebrated pronunciamentos about Spender, it was impossible not to recognise, amid a good deal of exaggeration and unfairness, the aptness of some of his main ...”

“... account for it with the distanced insight that deprivation begets violence, for this was a middle-class crime. Middle-class crime permits middle-class identification, and along with it the frisson of broken taboo and threatened class identity. This ...”

“... Tory councillor, a Poor Law guardian and on school boards; and was charged during the First World War with evacuating the Blackwater Estuary in the event of a German invasion. But dogs were his real passion.Renowned as a breeder of greyhounds, Salter competed at field trials and was a judge at dog shows both nationally and internationally. In Russia he became ...”

“... with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus were of very wide interest. The Bolsheviks could well be said to have brought off a miracle. In the First World ...”

“... died. Schwieger’s unexpected success electrified the world, despite the fact that the European war had already been raging for nine months. Shock and horror swept through Allied and neutral nations alike. In New York City, the composer Charles Ives observed that passengers waiting for the ‘El’ train spontaneously began to sing the Gospel song ‘In the ...”

“... sitting amiably in front of shelves of books, rumpled and smoking a pipe. Many Japanese of the war generation would have no trouble understanding the reasons for the fanfare. Kiyosawa, a journalist, was consistent in his criticism of Japan’s military Government throughout the Second World War, and never succumbed to ...”

“... discomfort. Born in Bucharest, Weber was sent to school in England, served in the Second World War as a captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and in the course of his service spent the mid-1940s in India, after earlier stints in Belgium and Germany. Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly ...”