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“... I was a student in London and neither at an age nor in the mood for retrospection. The 1914-18 war went unmentioned at home. In April 1918 my father was wounded in the leg and invalided home for several months. Yet he neither limped nor complained of pain. It was the least of his injuries. If I’d asked him about the screams I sometimes heard at night or ...”

“... conference on the state of the planet. She announced that her concern was to right the mess (war, Third World poverty, ecological catastrophe, global capitalism) that her parents had made of the world. It was a moment before, astonished, I realised that she meant me. No dear, I thought, that’s not right. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t us. It was them. It ...”

“... which may or may not be right, but which lends the book a vision and a theme. To write of post-war Britain is to enter a long-running debate over the state of the nation which began about 1960 and has continued ever since. Many conflicting views have been expressed, but strange to say there is one assumption on which almost all participants agree. They all ...”

“... shifts in the British social structure which it manifested. Some take it as inevitable that, once class cleavages of a national character underpinned voting habits, the Labour Party was bound to come into its inheritance and fulfil its destiny. It seems more plausible to others of us, conversely, to regard the downfall of Liberalism as, at least in ...”

“... The title of Orlando Figes’s impressively wide-ranging book refers to a scene in War and Peace in which Natasha Rostov, the finest product of the European education favoured by the Russian aristocracy for more than a century, visits the far from luxurious home of a distant relative. He is a nobleman living in the country with his serf ‘wife’, Anisya; he has, it seems, abandoned that superior attitude to the Russian ‘people’, the narod, that generally characterises his class ...”

“... upheaval, anything to shake up the town. The closest thing we had was the invocation of the War Measures Act by Pierre Trudeau in October 1970, after a series of kidnappings by Quebec separatists. Soldiers with machine guns were posted across the city. Now, more than fifty years after his father called in the army, hundreds of enormous rigs were rolling ...”

“... has been different, but in ways that are not surprising: in England the struggle centred on class, in the US on money. Not that class and money are separable in either country, only that their precedence is reversed. Class – learning the codes of Oxbridge language and conduct ...”

“... always be only 18 minutes away by Super-Etendard. Servicemen are tumbling to it that the Falklands War was not about Queen and Country or the British national interest, that from a very early stage the sending of the battle fleet had far more to do with domestic politics and the political reputation of the occupant of 10 Downing Street.Tam Dalyell, 5 April ...”

“... When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under him, there is ‘around him nothing but the still earth and the stubble ...”

“... at least, Republicanism cannot exist without equality, since it ensures that no interest group, or class, or faction, can hijack the exercise of popular sovereignty, or merely subvert it, at the expense of other citizens. In Todd’s view, France must face up to the reality of a post-Republican era and admit that its leaders have sold its Revolutionary ...”

“... In South America, the scene of the most serious fighting, there were two separate theatres of war, one in the north (Bolívar’s arena) and one in the south (Argentina and Chile), but in each the main stream of events was complicated by numerous cross-currents. Harvey sorts things out very successfully by anchoring his narrative in the life-stories of ...”

“... which he quotes from here.) After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and did a deal with Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd of London and Liverpool, selling them two thousand barrels of Burmese oil a ...”

“... The rubble had been cleared away, but strange grasses and wild herbs had sprung up where the war-demolished houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time ...”

“... elegant and it explained why, in the golden age of economic growth after the Second World War, it wasn’t the old colonial and postcolonial exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods that dominated economic growth, but trade in manufactured goods between rich countries. The hour and a half Krugman spent laying out his new trade theory at the ...”