“... as Torrance writes, was willing to concede anything to stay in office; Torrance also quotes Margaret Bondfield, a junior minister in 1924, lamenting that the government had fallen because MacDonald ‘lost his head’. Torrance concludes that the most plausible explanation is that the prime minister had ‘simply had enough’. Certainly, he had reason ...”

“... housing block on an expanse of dirt, documents the desolation. Married women’s employment rates rose steadily in the postwar years, not only because families wanted to share in the new consumerism but also because – as Betty Friedan understood and oral histories confirm – young married women everywhere were going mad with loneliness, frustration and ...”

“... the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from ...”

“... of its woods! After lunch we turned west, climbed the hill again through the hedges of wild rose, past gardens scented with mock-orange, stocks and lilacs – the scents were heavily intoxicating everywhere – and then dropped down through the woods to another Evenlode reach and an old stone bridge where the cattle stood up to their knees in the water ...”

“... the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this when her narrow foot was measured – size five and a half, but the left slightly longer than the right – though she understood that she would no longer be ...”

“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... industrial and financial power, remained in important other respects outsiders. How and why they rose to the top Mosse has described in his Jews in the German Economy. The present book delineates the arriviste’s main problem: what to do on arrival. As with the Jews’ cultural role so with their economic. The scholarly reaction to anti-semitic stereotyping ...”

“... union cultures. The brightest star in the left firmament was the Fife miner, Lawrence Daly, who rose to the post of NUM General Secretary under the presidency of Scargill’s predecessor, Joe Gormley. Daly was in many ways the opposite of Scargill: intellectually curious, extraordinarily well-read, ostensibly – and certainly in his later years, when he ...”

“... work of women imaginative writers.’ So into the witness-box come successively Edna O’Brien, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. In the case of three, perhaps four, of the witnesses nothing is said about how they give their evidence. In the two years that Rebecca West was contributing to the Clarion, 1912 and 1913, she ...”

“... Federal social spending. In Europe, it is associated with the triumph and continued victories of Margaret Thatcher and with shifts away from social-democratic control in a number of other regimes.1That claim of ‘crisis’ is, however, a very ambiguous one. Contemporary discussions, relying on unclear and often misunderstood terms and data, show that the ...”

“... Islamism of today is very different from the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, when radical jihadis rose up against secular-nationalist regimes in Syria, Algeria and Egypt, turning Hama, Algiers and Cairo into war zones. Their interpretation of majority rule doesn’t always make room for minority rights, but aside from al-Qaida and a fringe of ...”

“... the Polish nobility in Galicia triggered a series of massacres, as Polish and Ruthenian peasants rose up against their landlords. Hunger riots were reported in Germany and France. During the following year, deepening political and confessional tensions in Switzerland culminated in the Sonderbund War, in the course of which a coalition of liberal and largely ...”

“... death or the meaning of either. The suicidal Lise of The Driver’s Seat is in the same boat as Margaret of the evil eye in Symposium: each is unable to control the murderousness she would use but finds her will thwarted by the accident or irony that is more truly mortal. Not through defiance or collusion or resignation is there any escape. The most moving ...”

“... Europe, seems to be even more dubious than the transformation thesis. It derives in part from Margaret Murray’s frequently discredited claims that the nocturnal rites described by those accused of witchcraft did actually take place, and that they were the remnants of a pagan fertility cult hostile to Christianity. Ginzburg is sceptical about the first ...”

“... and Powell, but he was not destined to be on the backbenches for long. In a debate on the NHS he rose to take on the speaker all Tories feared most, Aneurin Bevan. A few months later, Churchill made him Minister of Health. Macleod was so shaken that he had to go to a phone box to find out where on earth his ministry was. He announced that he would be the ...”