“... 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 ...”

“... by 1914 put Labour in a position to overtake the Liberals as the party representing the working-class interest. He has now moved closer to what seems to be broad agreement among historians of the period that the Liberal Party was in a stronger position, electorally speaking, in 1914 than it looked in retrospect. Even though the First World ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... host, but is it the right one and should he use it? Who scored the most centuries in first-class cricket? Two incorrect answers have been taken away. Ricky Ponting and Jack Hobbs are left. The show, in other words, provides the narrative structure of the film, but also something more: an atmosphere of chance and suspense, where the sheer tackiness of ...”

“... Soviet Union during the Purges of the late 1930s, and in France under German occupation in World War Two (as well as after the Liberation). Mass denunciation is also precipitated by moral panics, as it was during the Salem witch-hunts, or at the time of the anti-Communist hysteria in the US in the 1950s, or, more recently, in the extraordinary outburst of ...”

“... during the Thirties, novelists and poets, coming from a background of the professional middle class, and most of them born between 1905 and 1910. The accident of the time, as well as of the social class into which they were born, accounts for many of their attitudes during a period that covered two world wars – or ...”

“... under-35s abstained, compared to 38 per cent of those between the ages of 60 and 69. Education and class played a key role. Among school dropouts, the vote for the Rassemblement National was 10 per cent above the national average; among those with a degree it was 11 per cent below. Only 12 per cent of blue-collar workers voted for En Marche, compared to 28 per ...”

“... the slaughter was great, but very far from including a whole generation – or in showing how class-bound the whole notion was: the sacrificed generation consisted more or less entirely of officers. However, it appears that he himself is under the spell of this Georgian myth; it would certainly have been possible to include a few English thinkers, notably ...”

“... sheer exhaustion – it has entailed. The party I joined was in Bermondsey, a traditional working-class Labour stronghold – one of the safest seats in the country – represented in Parliament by Bob Mellish, whose blunt and bombastic populism was exactly what that sort of seat, that sort of politics, had always considered it needed. But things were ...”

“... Revolutions have frequently been analysed and categorised. Wars, and the art of war, have been carefully studied. But the category of civil wars has been neglected. Perhaps this is because they are difficult to recognise or to define. Should we continue to write about guerres franco-françaises, arising from the Paris Commune, the Resistance movements, or the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète formed by Algerian settlers, or should we think of them as civil wars? Often there is a reluctance to admit to the existence of civil wars as anything other than an accident or temporary aberration: many English historians have liked to play down the importance of the English Civil War and tell anecdotes about the way in which the two sides paused at the moment of battle so that a hunting party could pass between them, or, more philosophically, to ask whether the Civil War had any effect on English history at all ...”

“... US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to the present that have turned America’s quintessential union city into one in whose political and cultural life labour is only a shadowy presence. A major contribution to understanding the city’s ...”

“... When Chamberlain took the British to war in September 1939, he had little idea of how they would respond. Very few of those in authority did. In their introduction to this important collection of documents, Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang point out the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that separated ministers and civil servants from ‘the broad mass of the British public ...”

“... What Kuper fails to note is that both the Hapgood and Matthews autobiographies came out after the war and were doubtless ghosted by patriotic journalists responding to anti-German chauvinism. The idea of the deferential Hapgood daring to risk his captaincy and career by telling an FA superior to put the Nazi salute ‘where the sun doesn’t shine’ is pure ...”