“... 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 ...”

“... The class reunion – the gathering of a given year of graduates at their high school or college – is a Big American Event, and the biggest, most elaborate class reunion is the ‘Harvard 25th’, celebrating the quarter-century from each Harvard class’s year of graduation ...”

“... Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president (1829-37) was his war against the Bank of the United States, a private corporation chartered by Congress whose powers made it the closest thing to an American central bank until the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. The Bank ...”

“... Publications about the Great War continue to proliferate, hardly needing additional stimulation from the 70th anniversary of the Armistice. The present books are just a few on the subject to appear during 1988, and despite publication dates close to 11 November only one of these seems to be a largely opportunistic production ...”

“... 1968: I was editing the Black Dwarf, a magazine I intended to promote socialist ideas for working-class readers. It was welcomed, however, by a quite different readership – the ‘student generation in revolt’ of Ronald Fraser’s title – and I was made to surrender my editorship to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the ...”

“... social conservatism, in all classes’. Part One of the collection, though entitled ‘The Working Class in British Politics’, shows it in mainly passive roles – acted on, by its leaders or misleaders, more often than it acted. Part Two, ‘The Working Class in British Society’, is more faithful to its title. Two ...”

“... say that he belongs to two earlier moments. His Christian conservatism dates from the early Cold War, warmed over by the neoconservative revival of the 1980s for which Helmut Kohl was the battering ram. The social market economy is for Schäuble not simply an economic policy option but the social form most appropriate to humanity, in its fallibility and ...”

“... of capitalism,’ Hobsbawm wrote in Age of Extremes, ‘was to save its antagonist both in war and peace – that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself.’ Again, interpretations of 1917 and its aftermath have changed almost out of recognition. Most contemporary readers of history probably agree that the ...”

“... led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during the course of the struggle against the King had ...”

“... was beginning to sense its impotence after the part it had played in bringing to an end the war in Vietnam, I was asked to give a talk at the University of Florence on the subject of American radicalism. Italian students and academics, many of them Marxists and feminists, seemed to appreciate my account of a student phenomenon that was unable to reach ...”

“... and taxis were idle; garbage collection stopped; banks, hotels, offices, restaurants and middle-class neighbourhoods felt the pinch. Congress was unable to convene. Outnumbered and often undersupplied, the poorly paid paramilitary police fought highly theatrical but nonetheless violent street battles against tens of thousands of Aymara and Quechua ...”

“... more generally acknowledged is partly because Jennings died only five years after the end of the war, at the age of 43, but mostly because, as Kevin Jackson says in this engaging, adulatory biography, he ‘spent most of his professional life not in the glamorous and highly publicised world of features’, but as a jobbing documentary-maker on the payroll of ...”

“... F.D.R., he turned Washington into a city of hope: that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment.’ Now we know why there were pictures of Kennedy in bars and public places in Europe, as of Churchill, and previously of Roosevelt, but not of any other President on anything like a similar scale. About the missile ...”