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“... system is so incompetent that if nothing is done Russia will gradually deteriorate into a second-class power. The ruling class has the alternatives, neither of them very plausible, of accepting relegation or changing the system. There is, however, a third possibility, which is the traditional device of an authoritarian ...”

“... Emma Broase puts the point briskly: ‘You see ... it is this Freudian stuff. Subjectivity before class, it’ the whole post-war rot.’ Suspicious of the tentative uncertainties and obscure passions of the inner life, Williams conceives human experience in terms of schematic forces larger than any single situation. Life ...”

“... The persecution of Europe’s witches, by this account, becomes in part a way of disciplining a class of semi-autonomous beer producers into accepting the work and gender order of the domestic household.Ever since Hammurabi’s Code (a set of Babylonian legal texts composed around 1754 bce), most societies have restricted a woman’s freedom to enjoy, make ...”

“... trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the war on terror. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx ...”

“... a chilly outside toilet on a dusky evening, the traditional dark colours worn by middle and upper-class women who rarely left the gloom of their deep-eaved houses. Tanizaki had an abhorrence of the well-lit toilet, the distant nocturnal view ruined by urban electric lighting, the white ceramic tableware which took away the mystery from a bowl of ...”

“... Which gets another hare running, since families that magyarised their names before the First World War were often Jewish. So, Misha Danos: a Hungarian background, but not from Hungary; a Latvian who manifested little love for Latvia; Jewish, or maybe not, since he passed most of the war unscathed and unhidden in Riga and ...”

“... Middle East and West Asia, issued a press release reporting that the USS Gravely, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, had shot down two missiles fired by Yemeni Houthis at a US-owned container ship, the MV Maersk Detroit, in the Gulf of Aden. A third Houthi missile had landed in the sea. There was no damage to the ship. The Gravely was part of Operation ...”

“... of the practice, though it was largely levelled to make way for a memorial to the Great Patriotic War, built during the last years of the Soviet and the first years of the Russian state: a fantastic piece of kitsch, uncannily representative of the mingling of Communist and nationalist currents in contemporary Russian politics. Moscow was a ...”

“... the Senate, and told him to run for president. When he won in 2008, Obama went to the head of the class, above the reach of pragmatic advice from people who could have taught him some things. They could have taught him, for one thing, that the Republicans of these years are not placable and will not ‘come around’. The American establishment as a ...”

“... suspicions that, despite official denials, those powers who wanted to intervene in the Civil War were doing so. Of even greater significance was his emphasis on the targeting of civilians: ‘In the form of its execution and the scale of destruction it wrought, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military ...”

“... knowledge, even among the otherwise well-informed, that a high proportion of the Asian business class in Britain are Gujarati, speakers of the language of Gujarat, the mainly Hindu area of North-West India whose most famous son was Mahatma Gandhi. Nor is it well-known that many of these Gujarati belonged to the exodus of Asians from East Africa in the late ...”

“... Such parentheses hint at his political and non-religious opinions, his sexual experience and his class-consciousness. On the last page, he arrives at Cambridge and remarks: ‘For the first time in my life I was surrounded by the upper classes en masse. They all looked bigger and stronger than me!’ Another Cambridge man, Sir Denis Forman, is of the ...”

“... of constraint. Though Mernissi grew up in a household where the radio transmitted news of the war in both Arabic and French, the young men affected the mannerisms of Rudolph Valentino and even the women sometimes ventured collectively to the movies (taking care to buy up tickets for four rows, while occupying two), the walls of the urban harem often ...”

“... of aristocratic power, wealth and leadership which are seen here as ending with the First World War. The postscript’s connection with the main text, however, is left tantalisingly vague, with the impression that loss of supremacy has not affected the aristocracy too seriously, that they have continued to adapt successfully to changing circumstances just ...”

“... films provoked and when Britannia Hospital was shown at the Cannes Festival during the Falklands War the British delegation staged a walk-out. But quite over what it would be hard to say. There’s a scene in the film where, during a strike of hospital workers, an ambulance is allowed through the picket lines but hospital porters insist on taking their tea ...”