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“... roll: Daryl Derek Randy Kevin. He divides the classroom in two. We are going to fight the Civil War again.Liberation Day, down to the title, is a spiritual successor to Saunders’s last collection, 2013’s Tenth of December. (That long ago, really? Well, he was busy becoming an international institution.) At first, it doesn’t seem to progress much ...”

“... journey on the Metropolitan, knowing that from 1910 until the start of the Second World War commuters – and returning theatregoers – could for sixpence travel in one of the company’s Underground Pullmans, and as the train clanked along be served meals in a mahogany dining-room behind green damask curtains. We passed Neasden. When the first ...”

“... ends of the social spectrum yet both firmly in Mugabe’s camp: the veterans of the liberation war and the small but growing number of indigenous businesses, hitherto the main beneficiaries of independence under majority rule. At the end of the liberation war in 1980, 20,000 guerrillas had been incorporated into the ...”

“... the British Isles, once largely covered with dense forest and occupied by a tribespeople fierce in war and given to cannibalism, and now, when you drive through or fly over, seen to be cleared and farmed, swamps drained, rivers dammed for hydro-electricity, lakes created, harbours and cities and roads and airports built – all orderly and productive, most of ...”

“... pumped with a pint of HIV-infected semen; the arms dealer who supplied both sides in the Iran-Iraq war is bled to death, in allusion to Teheran’s Martyrs’ Fountain. All these retributions are narrated autobiographically and without identification in such a way as to hint to the reader that Colley may himself be the vigilante with a socialist ...”

“... sum on the pools, and this enables him to give his family every luxury that a conventional middle-class imagination can conceive. They take to their wealth as to an oddly onerous duty; frequent use of the Harrods account seems like an obligation. Rachel is welcomed to their home, and it comes to be felt that Rachel’s advanced worldliness will be useful to ...”

“... addicts: people can become hooked on real-life crime stories, just as they can on pornography and war books. Readers who are not broadly addicted to the whole subject may turn to the interviews that reflect their own criminal experience – and ask difficult questions of their own. Just before Christmas, I was mugged in Hackney. Returning from a ...”

“... debtors. But these top tax rates are no lower than they were immediately before the Second World War, which is very much higher than they were immediately before the First; and the level of welfare benefits is still higher in real terms than it was in the Thirties, when exactly the same arguments were conducted between Left and Right over whether they were ...”

“... his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate. In this book he regretfully parts ...”

“... insight with meticulous scholarship. He is perhaps the unique example in modern times of a world-class physicist turned historian. His first excursion into the history of science was his life of Einstein. The book was widely acclaimed by scientists, but less enthusiastically received by some historians who, while not denying Pais’s mastery of the ...”

“... unified the squad.The ‘woke’ v. ‘sus’ conflict is a symptom of Sean’s broader class confusion. If the ‘sus’ means tasteless or offensive things tolerated in certain (working-class, male) company but also sketchy or actually bad behaviour, ‘woke’ indicates a separate code adopted by his ...”

“... On 3 October 1922 Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk and old member of the Stepney Elocution Class, was stabbed to death in the street near his home in Ilford. His wife, Edith, was with him; her lover and former lodger, Frederick Bywaters, was the attacker. These circumstances were not disputed when the couple were charged with Thompson’s murder ...”

“... is the sense of the expression intended by Frederic Manning (Private 19022) when he called his war memoir of 1930 Her Privates We. As in the case of Marvell’s dead lover, the two strains of sense in the word conflict: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are both private and deprived. Spacks’s main interest is in the 18th century, and its reading habits as ...”

“... Begin’s was a social revolution, based on promises of social change and on giving the working class, which the Labour Party had alienated, a sense of belonging. Begin carried out a social revolution, but used the ‘train ticket’ he received from the people to travel to the Occupied Territories. I would like to be the Menachem Begin of the Labour ...”

“... itself from the collective, eventually revealing himself as very unlike his fellows. The tug-of-war between that ‘I’ and ‘we’, and the turbulence within the ‘we’, provides much of the book’s tension. Walter came to the village 12 years previously as the manservant of Master Kent, lord of the manor by right of marriage. The hierarchy between ...”