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“... one of the longest serving Tory leaders this century. Unlike Churchill he was not a great war leader, however, and unlike Thatcher and Baldwin he was not successful electorally. He won only one election victory as leader, in 1922, and only then, some would say, because he was more obviously not Lloyd George than anyone else. He can claim no great ...”

“... there, perhaps, never been a ‘right’ man (or woman): is it in the nature of British working-class politics that those who come to the fore are always those who, as the saying goes, could scarcely organise a piss-up in a brewery? The Edwardian pioneers had no settled leader (the SDP has sound scriptural precedent here): Keir Hardie’s talents were other ...”

“... de Valera that reconfigured the UK, created the Irish Free State and generated a bitter civil war. Who Connolly was, what he had stood for and the reasons he took part in the rising were of no consequence in Jordan’s film. What was important was the goal of independence for which the fifteen had given their lives. This depiction was in line with the way ...”

“... a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear ...”

“... ease’. This subtle poem implies with kindness and craft what so many writers from working-class backgrounds labour on about: the continuing need for a communal background from which the writer has been isolated by individual intelligence, the need for                      blank printer’s ems by which all eloquence gets ...”

“... II arrived and eagerly signed the death warrants that had so troubled his grandfather. Middle-class opinion, too, was changing, first in reaction to anarchist ‘outrages’, then with the spread of harsher views about the ‘degenerate’ hereditary criminal. The legal official who referred in 1912 to ‘obdurate monsters’ spoke for a growing ...”

“... The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to reveal the same crusading zeal on the other side of ...”

“... The spectacle of members of the upper class setting out solemnly and in a spirit of scientific research to study the lower classes in their natural habitat is a peculiarly Thirties phenomenon. Earlier social investigators, like the Webbs, had quarried their material at second hand from mountains of blue books, reports and statistical abstracts ...”

“... at peace for over half the period under review, although he ascribes too little damage to the war with Spain. Other benefits flowed from a distracted Continent. War and religious persecution encouraged a migration of skilled craftsmen, professionals of various kinds, entrepreneurs and artists, who, it is generally ...”

“... last generation of historians was convulsed by the problem of the relationship between the civil war and long-term class conflicts, a controversy which has been as fertile as it has come to seem misconceived. Now, if fur ever flies, it is over the question where the Earl of Northumberland was on 31 July 1647. The ...”

“... Dorothy Dix’s column in the Daily Mirror in 1935 for the format to be adopted for a mass working-class audience in the UK. The Mirror’s success with Dix encouraged its rivals to hire agony aunts of their own. Soon they were appearing in more self-consciously serious publications such as Lansbury’s Labour Weekly and the Miner. Though the audience for ...”

“... or even reversed but for the peculiar decadence and irresponsibility of the British governing class. His latest book, a swingeing attack on the social and economic policies of the Churchill coalition from 1940 to 1945, is best understood as Part Two of the Barnett Report on What’s Wrong with Britain. In Part One, The Collapse of British Power, published ...”

“... distinctions is between two kinds of political struggle. What he variously called the ‘war of manoeuvre’ or the ‘war of movement’ entailed the seizure of state power. This is not a problematic concept, and has as its clear model the Bolshevik experience. Understandably, in the inter-...”

“... which opened the way for a scientific approach to ‘the interaction of religion and economics, class and culture, regional and metropolitan forces’, unfortunately bypassed Ireland, McCormack says in The Battle of the Books, leaving a vacuum into which – we may suppose – a lot of hot air has rushed. As part of his effort to do away with the type of ...”

“... Soldiers’, an extraordinary account of lunching with Prince Norodom in Cambodia, are to high-class war and travel journalism what brandy is to wine or calvados to cider. Well, here are your facts, obscure, exotic, detailed, packaged in the artfullest words – what more do you want? One can only reply that their very profusion, the equable relaxed ...”