“... farmers anywhere to make much more than a minor contribution. There have been some (mainly middle-class) marketing successes, such as organic food (most of which is imported), but most financial high points for British farmers have been the result of subsidies, tariff barriers, U-boats – and productivity gains as a result of technology. Lawrence gives a ...”

“... villages. The PKK, founded by the student leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, began a guerrilla war in 1984, claiming the Kurds’ right to self-determination within (this was always stressed) the framework of a democratised and demilitarised Turkish state. By ‘democratisation’ Kurds mean the repeal of laws used to harass minorities or to deny them ...”

“... Essays on Fiction (1983), that his own inadequacy as a mediator had been demonstrated. There was a war on, ‘and he who ventures into no-man’s-land brandishing cigarettes and singing carols must expect to be shot at.’ It was altogether a turning-point for him. Like St Jerome in Bethlehem, he retired to his study and applied himself to his Bible (the ...”

“... he backs off furiously. Hester Prynne, Clarissa, Tess, Anna Karenina – life is indifferent to class when it comes to trapping us in stories. Still, as Tess complains to her mother, ‘ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.’ The poor have no choice but to end up in novels because they do not read ...”

“... forerunner of Guevara.By the standards of the time, Guevara had a fairly conventional upper-middle-class upbringing. His childhood, like his short adult life, was dominated by his asthma. His parents were obliged to move, largely for his sake, from the semi-tropical lowlands of Misiones to Alta Gracia, on the lower slopes of the Andes above Córdoba. Guevara ...”

“... and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long ...”

“... quiet, disenchanted treatment suggests a deeply alternative reading. Although from quite distinct class and religious backgrounds, both Marx and Engels were Rhinelanders – that is, natives of a region where different cultural and linguistic communities had fused together. Inextricable cross-fertilisation of influences lay at the root of what became ...”

“... was later to lose his fortune in the financial crisis that followed the end of the Napoleonic War, and the family suffered the humiliation of a downward social spiral, shifting from one down-at-heel abode to another. Eventually, Newman Senior was declared bankrupt and died in his prime of ‘what they used to call a broken heart’, as Cornwell puts it ...”

“... this process starts in a district it goes on until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.’ The change, she implies, is not desirable. The very people who lament the loss of ‘authenticity’, come on maudlin about ‘real people’ and censure gentrification ...”

“... legislation when he was Prime Minister of the Cape; and he was directly responsible for the Boer War and all its repercussions, thanks to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. It is harder to calculate the long-term effects of his actions on the Matabele tribe, and the results of his colonisation north of the Zambezi. It is perhaps sufficient to observe that he ...”

“... an unearned income, not to become dependent on expensive domestic aids, which I knew most working-class women survived without. If I now feel critical of those attitudes as romantic and unrealistic it is because they remind me of a politics envisaged almost entirely in terms of my own conscience and peace of mind, which failed to take me towards other ...”

“... where historical drama presented mouth-watering images of an aristocratic or upper-middle-class past. But although Wright kept an eye on such things, his curiosity ranged far beyond the media. Having set off on a quest into the origins of the conservationist mentality, he traced it to a variety of sources both high and low, famous and obscure. He ...”

“... before rising to the rank of major in the Highland Light Infantry during the Second World War. He was also a pillar of the Kirk. A glowering – and sometimes snide – authoritarianism was second nature to Ross, who ran Scotland in the manner of a brusque, no-nonsense dominie. His ignorant charges included most Scottish Labour MPs, especially the new ...”

“... Egypt; by the end of the third book, the stage has expanded to encompass an intercivilisational war that spans not only the three-dimensional universe but other dimensions too.The grand scale of Cixin’s story is supported by an immense quantity of research. He graduated from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in 1988 and ...”