“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the virtues conducive to victory. But it was obvious to those who found the message of the Boer War not in the ultimate triumph but in the series of miserable fiascos which had scarred the early stages of the conflict, that the sporting spirit was not enough. Lord Rosebery, presenting the FA Cup in 1897, might assert that football helped bring out those ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for whom the entire Communist episode was a criminal enterprise undertaken by middle-class cultists. The figures who were at the helm of the AIA – Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe, James Holland, James Fitton, James Boswell, Betty Rea, Nan Youngman, Clive Branson – are largely forgotten. The first two may be known to aficionados of ...”

“... By standing alone against Hitler in the summer of 1940, the British ensured that ultimately the war would be won and the evils of Nazism destroyed for ever. Now for the Ponting version, in which there is more than a hint of autobiography. At an impressionable age, Ponting explains, he was captivated by Churchill’s ...”

“... to trooping by the Americans and was plying as the Leviathan. The Aquitania, shedding her war paint, emerged unscathed from trooping as she would from the next world war. Shorter lived was the Mauretania, that long-time Riband holder, a proud vessel which, when asked by a French Caribbean island, ‘Which ship are ...”

“... million in the second half of the 19th century and were Galsworthy’s symbols of the middle-class backbone of Victorian England. As a Forsyte, Timothy had, needless to say, rather more energy than he feared: he saved £2000 a year and died aged 101, worth five times what he had been on retirement. But his brothers would have done more with his ...”

“... was provoked by the ‘Teds’, who emerged from the distinctly non-affluent districts of working-class London. Few were willing to concede that Teddy Boys were direct descendants of the cosh boys and Blitzkids of the Forties, and that their territorial rivalries were a continuation, not only of earlier forms of gang ritual in urban working-...”

“... After the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916-17 and with no sign of war abating, my husband’s grandfather, the oldest child of an impoverished widow in the central German town of Kassel, ran away to join the navy. He was hungry, and though underage and not really military material imagined sailors probably got enough to eat ...”

“... for by annual vote of the House of Commons, and an officer corps drawn so largely from the same class of gentlemen as filled Parliament as to be untroubled by its obligation to obey the civil power. Other countries with more uppity armies have been troubled in this respect. Even today it can be risky in some Latin American states, as also in Turkey, to be ...”

“... had been undermined long before the shots of Sarajevo. At the outbreak of the First World War trade unions had over three million members and were threatening a general strike; the size of the Civil Service had more than doubled between 1900 and 1914, mainly to administer Lloyd George’s welfare state. Individualism was just as much under attack from ...”

“... George Orwell saw the patriotism of the British working class as an almost unconscious link with the middle and upper classes: ‘Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together, and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf’ (The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941 ...”

“... With the virtual disappearance of the Jewish working class in the Diaspora, and the decline of the Labour movement in Israel, Jewish socialism is beginning to look historically limited, rather than an intrinsic part of a cultural heritage. The idea that the Jews are somehow natural radicals by virtue of their internationalism, messianism and inherited ethic of social justice does not stand up to scrutiny ...”