“... in Irish history, had not the British authorities, already knee-deep in the quagmire of the Great War, made the grave miscalculation of executing 16 of the rebel leaders, thus granting them the martyrdom that many of them had sought. Indeed, even the victims of that ‘blood sacrifice’, as it came to be considered, might have been consigned harmlessly to ...”

“... Yet both were of decisive importance in redirecting the state after a catastrophe. The Great War and the Slump alike necessitated a clearing-up operation to restore a sense of stability and normality. The paradox on each occasion was that such a restoration demanded innovations and a clear break with the past. In recent years, the idea of coalition has ...”

“... of the book that these epigrams grace are more than purely descriptive. One is headed ‘How Class War Dulled English Literature’. Gray has provided us with a brief opinionated history of England to accompany his chronologically arranged prefaces. Unopinionated histories are uninteresting. Most of the examples from earlier times are encrusted with ...”

“... exports made up 55 per cent of all coal traded internationally. Output fell during the First World War, and there were a number of crises as the Government sought desperately to maintain the coal supplies critical for the national war effort. The war over, it became clear that the world ...”

“... The present novel completes Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy. It ends just before the war itself ends, with the attempted crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal in which Wilfred Owen was killed. You can read it without having read Regeneration or The Eye in the Door, because these are novels that cover the same ground again, and again, like the battles their characters replay in memory and nightmares ...”

“... Ndebele, Ranger argues that the Kikuyu élite were in process of becoming a land-owning capitalist class ready to collaborate with the colonial power and join the Home Guard, thus sharpening African resistance to British rule on the whetstone of class struggle; whereas Ndebele protests were articulated by compromised chiefs ...”

“... an excellent historical writer for children – recalls that he was early made aware ‘of a Civil War feeling, that Hereford and the Welsh had stood for the King, and that across the Severn to the East of us were others who had taken another side. I was to hear much about this business in my early youth, for its passions still ran high.’ Very few children ...”

“... slopping up orthodox doses of the black stuff, are confronted by an ironic account of the Class Warrior on the toot. And some of them don’t like it, they are there for the sounds, the freeform headaches. They didn’t palm their complimentary tickets for this filth. The cold sober rush of Home’s amphetamine prose is delivered, with no ...”

“... Hobsbawm’s writing is grounded in this classical Marxism and his politics in the mass working-class parties which high capitalism created. The reader should know one other thing: that he has been all his political life (and still is) a member of the Communist Party, and this, too, is unusual among British Marxist historians of his generation. In the 15th ...”

“... he was ninety he would be able to free himself from ‘these fleshly desires’.In the late Cold War, letter-writing provided one of the chinks in the iron curtain. Harold began writing to the Aidovs after seeing the name and address of their daughter in a publication by Amnesty International, a translation of Soviet samizdat that included contact details ...”

“... red lights near Dublin’s wide main thoroughfare. Andrews’s family belonged to the lower middle class, and lived over their small dairy business in a slum area. He grew up close to the kind of people whose talk has been immortalised by Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan. Indeed, Andrews claims that Fluther Good in O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars was once ...”

“... Protestants who have always found a natural home in Republican movements. But it was the 1914-18 war which, more even than the Dreyfus affair, brought Léon Blum belatedly into politics – he was already over forty. The Union Sacrée, uniting Left and Right in a wartime coalition against Germany, put him at the head of a department in collaboration with ...”

“... Pat Barker​ has written about war, mostly the First World War, again and again. In her new novel, Noonday, the last book in a trilogy, she takes characters forged in the first war, in Life Class (2007) and Toby’s Room (2012), on into the second – or into the second phase of one long conflict ...”

“... Communist parties – and had a smaller membership among women than they did. Like other working-class parties, it never succeeded in finding a stable balance between local and workplace activism. Like others, it attracted passionate readers and self-educators and, being Marxist, intellectuals. In other respects it was notably different. Though constantly ...”

“... as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page. But in the background a larger subject looms ...”