“... that the best destabilisation technique the Americans have had over the last thirty years of Cold War has been Willis Conover, with his Voice of America programme beaming jazz two hours a night across the Iron Curtain. Not that Aksyonov presents his Moscow hippies as being in any sense politically vital. In one of the less ecstatic of his digressions, he ...”

“... He won his job and ended generations of Christian Democrat rule by appealing to younger middle-class voters – and their employers – who regard it as obvious that economic growth and carbon thrift go together. It wasn’t so obvious to the SPD boilermakers in Augsburg, with their eyes on traditional support in the old mining and steelmaking regions of ...”

“... is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most of the city’s leaders, and could trace his ancestors on his mother’s side back to the Trojan ...”

“... within Europe, by contrast with England, or with Spain and Portugal growing up out of the war against the Moors within Iberia. One of the many Celtic mysteries, which Calder could not have found space to explore, is why Celtic society in old Ireland, but not in the Irish-Scottish Highlands, seems to have been rigidly divided between a ruling ...”

“... for, as Hutton points out, the net effect of all these changes was ‘the entrenchment of the old class structure that Tory radicals affected to despise’, with the gap between those able and those unable to afford private health, welfare and education far, far worse at the end than when it began. Hutton is also rightfully scathing about the extent to which ...”

“... are still many places where one can live without papers and not too badly either, there are first-class plastic surgeons who will produce a better new face, and officials who will sell genuine identity cards and passports to fit it. But Escobar would not abandon his wife and children, whose lives were being threatened by a special Colombian police unit that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Manchester City Council, prompting the British Board of Film Censors to introduce a new class of certification: H for ‘horrific’. Set up twenty years earlier, the BBFC was the fledgling film industry’s engine of self-regulation. The fuss made in London and Manchester was a welcome shot across the bows, but elsewhere the H certificate soon ...”

“... harrowing account of the mental disorders Fanon encountered as a psychiatrist during the Algerian War of Independence. The argumentative force of this closing chapter, and its position in the book, throw doubt on the first chapter. Violence was never Fanon’s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage for colonised communities and individuals who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”