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“... in London. Worse, she had lived much of her life against the backdrop of the squalid sectarian war in ‘the North’, which had run a coach and horses through that tradition. Enda Delaney’s sensitive study, The Irish in Postwar Britain, tells the story of my grandmother’s generation of migrants. It’s a story of hardship and neglect but also of ...”

“... provoked a massive assemblage of what people had actually said in the course of the Second World War. It was as though these voices had been held back for half a century and were now bursting out. Martin Gilbert in The Day the War Ended, a recent account of the year 1945, showed how inexorably this could happen. In ...”

“... and timeless England. It is a quest to find in reality the England that existed as myth for a war-ravaged generation; the village at dusk, smelling of woodsmoke, surrounded by green fields; the thatched cottages and rambling gardens; the time-worn historical monuments. This was the land ‘worth fighting for’ in the propaganda of both world wars. That ...”

“... heroicaly in action on the Isonzo front in August 1915, wrote in his diary a week before that ‘war becomes like life itself. It’s all there is: not a passion any more nor a hope. Like life, rather sad and resigned, it wears a tired face, seamed and worn, similar to our own.’ All over Europe young men were finding out much the same thing, but this ...”

“... the social ladder: while only 10 per cent of houses were owner-occupied before the First World War, by 1939 that figure was around a third. Those new homes, moreover, were more modern and comfortable, with indoor bathrooms (finally), running water and gardens. The expansion of the national grid meant they were electrified as well; indeed, by 1939, 75 per ...”

“... a reform they had played no small part in bringing about. The eyecatching and well-publicised war service performed by British women over the previous four years had slowly recast the suffrage debate. Patriotic displays of civic duty – from making munitions to tilling the land – made demands for equal citizenship hard to resist; the needs of the ...”

“... incomparably more urgent, organising internment on this scale distracted Cabinet, Home Office and War Office. Troops were tied down guarding harmless aliens at a time when Dad’s Army was nightly expecting invasion. Highly skilled refugees whose talents would have enhanced Britain’s war effort wistfully stared at barbed ...”

“... to help him find out what it is. If the ‘actor’ was a serviceman invalided out of the Great War for ‘lunacy’, as it was then called, and the audience was a psychiatric profession that believed, as most German doctors and many of their British colleagues apparently did, that, in Peter Barham’s words, ‘the so-called ...”

“... Boas rents a room in a street of terraced houses that were once occupied by ‘superior working-class families, who kept them in beautiful condition’, but which have now been turned into bedsits. By the 1960s, Hackney’s Jewish community is fading: some, like Boas’s sister who married well and lives in Finchley, have prospered and moved on, while the ...”

“... This form has been especially important in our own period because of the preoccupations of class. There has been a demand for accounts of class formation and class transition supported by the substance of individual experience. Even the strangest of us, within this form, can be ...”

“... history setting out to repeat itself as tragedy. Over the last hundred years three major ruling-class crises have shaped Spanish history. Each of these, including the present one, has of necessity involved the economically-dominant classes in trying to find new means to legitimise their continued domination in the face of the growing strength of the social ...”

“... The war that broke out in 1914 was the first in which highly industrialised and urbanised states were to be found on both sides, and industrial muscle and urban stamina counted for as much as military professionalism, conscript grit and peasant stoicism. How far urban stamina could be relied on was not the least of the questions troubling nationalists in the years before the war ...”

“... attitudes to sex and caste are often combined, among the newly educated Hindu middle class, with deep religious faith, and this faith is often associated with Hindu nationalist politics. Indian businessmen have contributed something like $350 million to support the rebuilding of the temple of Ram on the site of a demolished mosque in the town of ...”

“... gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping time’ and be ‘divinely happy’, that things could be ‘jolly nice’, or that she had scared ‘the cat into fits’ – but not that at ...”

“... Working-class memory generated Pat Barker’s writing. Her early fiction presented itself as a tribute to generations of suffering and survival in the industrial North-East of England. It seemed to fall into a ready-made tradition: ‘the grit, the humour, the reality of working-class life’, Virago burbled cheerfully about Union Street (1982 ...”