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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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-...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the New York Times said in June 1942, ‘but it is certainly the finest yet made about the present war, and a most exalting tribute to the British.’ The film was Mrs Miniver, whose heroine had come from a 1939 bestseller by the British writer Jan Struther. MGM’s 1942 movie had little else in common with her book, however, nor did its glossy portrait of a ...”

“... 1970s and ‘Guns for Banta’, a feature she shot in 1970 in Guinea-Bissau during the liberation war against the Portuguese.Maldoror moved on from her successes as briskly as she did from projects that never came good. She was generous with her own material. In Chris Marker’s peripatetic essay Sans Soleil (1983), the documentary footage of liberation ...”

“... maxim, even though argued and illustrated, is not a theory of history.’ The argument that ‘ “class interest” cannot be an explanation of the actions of people who have no conception of the class to which they have been retrospectively assigned ... is a different kind of thesis,’ which ‘cannot be settled one way ...”

“... This did not go down well. Though she had always come first in science in her (co-educational) class, the headmaster was adamant: he was not teaching Higher School Certificate maths to girls. Or chemistry. Or physics. She was allowed to do biology, but apart from that had to choose arts subjects. She managed to persuade the local university that, were they ...”

“... on the Adriatic island of Rab: 2000 starving prisoners disarmed 2200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on Goli otok (‘Naked Island’), a notorious Communist concentration camp near Rab. While he was there, he and other prisoners were detailed to build a monument to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1943 rebellion ...”