“... have been calling for them to – the ICC would have the jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli war crimes committed in the conflict. But ICC membership may not be the panacea that some believe it to be. Even if the court overcame the obstacles to bringing a case, it still might not be able to deliver Israeli suspects to the dock. In the short term, the ...”

“... 1908 and 1911 he fell in love with the stolid, pragmatic instincts of the British governing class and the empire over which it ruled, despite the antisemitism which prevailed in both. In 1910 he changed his surname from Bernstein to Namier, and in 1913 became a British subject. But Oxford wasn’t willing to make him a don, so Namier launched himself ...”

“... be poignantly contrasted with real life in Liverpool. Envy, nostalgia, anti-élitism, a touch of class-battling – it could be just like old times. There is a real review to be conducted of Britain’s diplomacy, but it would not be much fun. It has nothing to do with the staffing levels of embassies, the cost of entertainment allowances, or whether the ...”

“... involving children abused till they died. These were reported in the press, especially the middle-class Neue Frei Presse, in a tone suggesting that such horrors were previously unheard of. The reports were sometimes sentimentalised – this is what can happen when country girls come to the wicked city – but also sanitised for the bourgeoisie, represented as ...”

“... powers and the USSR started by producing and stockpiling nuclear weapons as a deterrent to general war. The idea seemed simple enough. Because of the enormous amount of destruction that could be wreaked by a single nuclear explosion, the idea was that both sides in what we still see as an East-West conflict would be deterred from taking any aggressive action ...”

“... rule for more than a century before becoming part of the new Polish state after the First World War. His was a Jewish family that lived in a non-Jewish section of the city and spoke Polish at home. His father – an unsuccessful businessman, later an accountant – was a Zionist, but it was his lively mother who set the tone, and she had been ‘brought up ...”

“... the paper.’ Likewise, presumably in another fit, the author of The Origins of the Second World War let the cat out of the bag: ‘I wrote for relaxation when much taken up with College administration.’ This fit must have been insufficiently severe to make him set down on paper what he had once let slip in conversation, that the book had been written in ...”

“... exact three blocs were emerging at some speed. This new three-bloc world, rather than the Cold War, was, I suggested, the new order for which they must plan. This led to heated objections: Oceania and East Asia made sense to most, but, it was pointed out, for Eurasia to exist, Western Europe would have to achieve full economic integration with the eastern ...”

“... Rome was the model of rational and historical perfection, and an aristocracy, or at least an upper class, worthy of the name should live up to it. His satires batten on the discrepancy; but he has no real interest in the individuals who actually have to make up such a society, even at the highest level. It is here that his achievement as a novelist is so ...”

“... many of the long-term shifts in British society have been accelerating: from the manual working-class to the middle class; from manufacturing industry to service industries; from inner cities to suburbia; from the Northern provinces to the South. And in the process the two nations have begun to resurface in the shape of a ...”

“... hereditarian thesis from the environmentalist A.H. Halsey. This Burt published in early 1959 as ‘Class Differences in Intelligence I: A Reply to Miss Conway’. Immediately following Halsey’s four-page paper, he printed ‘Class Differences in Intelligence II: A Reply to Dr Halsey’ – a ten-page rejoinder ostensibly ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... words of Kenko Yoshida (1282-1350) on a master tree-climber: ‘This man belonged to the lowest class, but his words were in perfect accord with the precepts of the sages.’ The belief that universal truth may ultimately be attained through concentrated specialisation is encouraging and positive: no wonder many a Japanese mother today, fed up with a ...”

“... chronicles the nascent television industry. The book’s hero, Tom Rath, has returned from the war and is in the process of ‘heroically reconverting’ to civilian life as he soldiers through a drab and unsparingly depicted corporate landscape in order to provide honourably for wife and family. Flash forward fifty years to microserfs, and the scene is ...”

“... is called with inaccurate cosiness’ – is calmly presented to the reader as a typical middle-class hippy of those years: irresponsible, self-indulgent, dishonest and not very bright; yet at the same time we are not openly invited to shake our fists or hiss. Compare Dickens’s treatment of Mrs Jelly-by in Bleak House. As high-minded neglecters of their ...”