“... idea of what a good husband should be. Contrasted with this, Zeina’s marriage (Zeina is a lower-class foil for Aisha and Marianne, both Egyptian women inhabiting the world of half-European attitudes, foreign travel and university learning) is consummated in ritual fashion with the bridegroom’s bandaged finger brutally deflowering her in full view of her ...”

“... the stampede from Thatcherism. Scotland sought its protection in the traditions and certainties of class loyalty, rather than in the adventurism and risks of constitutional change. In that spring moment, Scotland’s nationalism revealed itself as a fragile bloom. I am not sure whether R.H. Campbell has found the entire reason for this frailty in his essay on ...”

“... participating symbolically, it is playing to win.’ With an activist core among younger middle-class Chileans, the Broad Front is now in an alliance with the Communist Party, giving it a formidable base across Chilean society.Every Friday night a ritual plays out on Santiago’s Plaza Baquedano. The surrounding streets fill with tear gas. Small bands of ...”

“... much in the way of liberal democracy, secular ethics, a skilled, politically conscious working class, suburban amenities or abstract expressionism. This time-warped situation is reflected in the dominant political current of traditional Ireland: nationalism. Nations are fairly recent contrivances, but the ideology of the movements which fight to establish ...”

“... shaped by mass entertainment. ‘Each action taken by the Department of Justice, as well as the war crimes commissions considered by the President and the Department of Defense,’ the Attorney General John Ashcroft has just declared in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, ‘is carefully drawn to target a narrow ...”

“... the boy on the unicorn in Forty Acres and a Unicorn (2007) – a reference to the unrealised Civil War promise to grant freed families ‘forty acres and a mule’ – is all-consuming. It’s not clear whether the boy is emerging from or being swallowed back into the dark swathe of disappointed history. A horizon, barely visible, gives the unicorn a ground to ...”

“... US army lieutenant-colonel much admired in military history circles for his books about World War Two, knows a real soldier when he sees one, and on most counts Churchill doesn’t measure up. He was certainly fascinated by soldiering from an early age – it was his toy soldiers, he claimed, that did it – but he seems to have gone to Sandhurst only ...”

“... A Very British Coup. We are concerned here with a Labour prime minister – a non-Oxonian, working-class version of Tony Benn – who is brought down, quietly and peacefully, by the forces of the ‘Establishment’ when he attempts to pull out of the American alliance and threatens the power of the newspaper-owners. This improbable prime minister is most ...”

“... and gawky, while Peierls is short and slightly built. Nor that Mott is as much the upper-middle-class Englishman as they make them – deeply unhappy at his public school, and belatedly flirting with Anglicanism – while Peierls, who fled from Hitler through a series of precarious jobs before putting down roots in England, is as much the German Jewish ...”

“... a failure of faith, or of imagination, or of art. The overwhelming catastrophe of the First World War is often cited as the point at which the British, sated with memorialism, could take no more. And yet, while the dead of previous wars had been buried in communal graves and this had not been considered in any way disrespectful, the British Government decided ...”

“... intelligence service, known generally as MI5, continued to expand even after the end of the Cold War, and by 1992, when Stella Rimington took over, it had more than 2300 staff. The volume of material circulated by GCHQ, the signals intelligence agency, and by SIS, the overseas intelligence service, also ensures them a significant place in government. In ...”

“... no similar action in regard to the Prussian or Austrian forces with whom France was also at war. The reason was that, according to Revolutionary dogma, Prussian and Austrian soldiers were slaves, forced at bayonet point to fight for the loathsome despots who ruled them. The English were different. They were, if not exactly a democracy, still a sovereign ...”

“... of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, are as funny and as humane as anything written in the post-war period. Her later popular biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Frederick the Great are exemplary for their wit and elegance. And she was a consist ently good journalist. One of the best pranks ever played on the public was her U and Non-U ...”

“... the remoter outposts of the Habsburg Empire since, as the largest component of the educated middle class in those parts, they were the people who actually used the standard literary German instead of the dialects spoken by the emigrant German diasporas of the East – Swabian, Saxon and (as German philologists confirmed, sometimes not without ...”

“... de Man’s life has come back into view like a return of the repressed. At the same time, race, class, gender, post-colonial and sexuality studies have suggested that the ‘death’ of canonical authors is a way of preserving their authority and shielding them from historical and political questioning. Gordon Millan’s biography of Mallarmé is written as ...”