“... who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of ...”

“... on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings weren’t romantic – she was a Soviet spy and he a scientist who knew ‘the most dangerous secret in the world’. His name was Klaus Fuchs. A US ...”

“... of France in the early 1980s, they could never get into power, given the constraints of the Cold War? In the past, parties offered both an identity and a set of alternatives, but voters didn’t really exercise choice because their identity determined the way they voted. Parties might have been representative, but they weren’t necessarily responsive; as ...”

“... caesura: an epoch dominated by the October Revolution, classical social-democratic working-class movements, and a Keynesian-Beveridge political economy, has now irretrievably passed. They also share the tendency to encapsulate the transition from one epoch to another in pithy slogans: John Lloyd speaks of ‘End-of-History politics’, for ...”

“... victory in 1906 and to carry a series of important social reforms in the years preceding the Great War. But, in Parry’s eyes, the ‘gaggle of outsiders’ who ran the parliamentary party during the Edwardian decade had largely forfeited their right to be known as ‘Liberals’. Asquith himself may well have inherited his leadership style from the Whig ...”

“... Cambridge colleges. The idea, spread by some, that Lord Butler (as he now is) was more ‘middle-class’, and therefore more acceptable to the rank and file of the Conservative Party, than Mr Macmillan with his alleged ‘grouse-moor image’ is rubbish. The difference between Marlborough and Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most ...”

“... invisible and more cranky with each book he published after the USA trilogy. Of the stars of the class of 1918, only William Faulkner survived gracefully, protected by a thick cloak of obscurity until the very end. The class of ’45, those writers who attained majority, or at least draft age, during the Second World ...”

“... can be found in his brief sketches of the gradients of Lyon, the long streets of Roubaix, middle-class houses in Touraine or the quality of light in the Ile de France. He can evoke, too, the inter-war years on the other side of the Channel, the ‘Bloomsbury boarding-houses kept by declining ladies, the stale smell of ...”

“... out in the sun. I suspect you have a real writing talent.’ Another of White’s obsessions is class, from the ‘rumpled’ prep school sons of Detroit auto executives to the gentility of the Upper East Side, where voices vibrate with accents ‘drilled in’ by private schools like Brearley and eyes open wide to reveal ‘their fine Chippendale ...”

“... of international recognition. Not long after, Engels would write The Condition of the Working Class in England and the subject would also be uppermost in Marx’s mind when he was writing Das Kapital. But Tocqueville was right to diagnose a British fixation. If the Victorian poor had been less poor, English literature would be a lot less rich, British ...”

“... one in 1942; but it just missed its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the second of which (published in 1949) was widely read. Both Strauss and Estorick were, as Clarke puts it, ‘partisan’ and made use of ‘selective access’ to Cripps’s private papers. His ...”

“... birth, of the sanctity of marriage. Menocchio was hostile to Latin as the language of a privileged class, and thought that ‘Holy Scripture has been invented to deceive man.’ The Apocryphal gospels were no less authoritative. He rejected images, ceremonies, the sacraments, saints’ days, the power, wealth and economic oppressiveness of the Church, and a ...”

“... of Burke and Adam Smith – but because of what has happened in the world since the Second World War. The various changes which have undermined the presuppositions of traditional socialism are by now familiar enough. But their cumulative effect has taken time to sink in. The failure of existing socialist societies to implement the traditional socialist ...”

“... party with modest redistributive aims. Its radicalism was not directed towards the working class, whose actual existence was beginning to be doubted by sophisticated progressive opinion, influenced by theories of embourgeoisement and by rapidly increasing real wages. Crosland had hoped for a classless society, which seemed an attainable aim – through ...”

“... election will be a battle between rival sects of the same capitalist faith rather than the grand war of competing ideologies that we have seen in the past. The Tories are of course the party of sleazeocracy, and in their willingness to be bought there is at present a genuine moral difference between the two sects. How much this is specific to the Tories and ...”