“... being of humble origins, would shrink at the sight of a policeman, whereas to people of Ford’s class policemen were servants you sent to fetch a cab when it rained. The gentleman business wasn’t all talk, however. Quite unnecessarily, since he was 41, he volunteered for the Army in 1915 and served in the trenches as an infantry officer. He may have ...”

“... and consequence-free sex, the period of royal mystery was brief, helped by the fact that a large war was going on for much of the time, when the intimate doings of the royal family may not have been uppermost in people’s minds. Reading the reissue of The Little Princesses, a simpler explanation for what Wilson calls the ‘cocoon of unknowability’ comes ...”

“... Tibetan lamas. When he urged his credulous followers to flee to South America to escape World War Three, and many sold all their belongings to settle in Uruguay, Chile and Brazil, a certain scepticism began to set in, especially since P.B. himself did not make the move. (He later claimed to have been in Australia, beaming peaceful thoughts in the ...”

“... the author had been her pupil and had given it to her just before the outbreak of the First World War. She – the diarist – was about twenty-one then. Not long afterwards, she went as a nurse to the Serbian front, where she died or, in Hug-Hellmuth’s words, ‘fell victim to the overwhelming onrush of events’. In 1915 Hug-Hellmuth showed the diary to ...”

“... question of how far Red terror was the result of grassroots militants settling scores with the ‘class enemy’. The research of social historians of the Russian Revolution, such as Diane Koenkov, S.A. Smith and Ronald Suny, has shown that the Bolshevik leadership in and immediately after 1917 was not only more susceptible to pressure from the masses than ...”

“... not ‘universal truth, but the machinery of universal application in the discovery of a certain class of truths ... I do not assign any universality to economic dogmas. It is not a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth.’ Unfortunately, monetarists are dogmatists, and, politically at least, they have triumphed. In the ...”

“... to deserve that favourite epithet ‘odd’, and to meditate on the trouvaille. The Middle of the War carries on its rough, browning wartime pages lines that almost anybody might have written at the time on the first page: ‘the enormous finger of the gun’. But there are others that suggest a more characteristic insight: ‘ruins are implicit in every ...”

“... myth which started about 1830 and finished, roughly speaking, at the beginning of the First World War was followed by a positivist reaction. One of the main causes of this reaction was the insistence of most of the proponents of theories about myth that their theory alone explained all myths, or at least most of them. Some of the theories could be made to ...”

“... is a cleaner environment’). Meanwhile, the long period of economic growth since the Second World War had failed to make the distribution of income more equal. The poorest 20 per cent of families received 5 per cent of total family income in 1947, and 5.2 per cent in 1977; the share of the richest 20 per cent fell from 43 per cent to 41.5 per cent (and these ...”

“... as Popski once did in Private Army. Lyall has a feeling for battles long ago and knows his World War Two, which he has used in this way before. He could be said to be repeating himself. Certainly he seems to do so in another episode, the visit to a dying colonel playing with toy soldiers in a chateau in the Midi – pretty close, this, to the scene of the ...”

“... to gold in 1925. The climax of this volume is a fascinating survey by A.K. Cairncross of the post-war years. In its analysis of the reasons for Britain’s relatively poor growthmanship the only dimension missing is the political: the issue of the economic costs, direct and indirect, of the hangover of British imperialism. I would like to see this chapter ...”

“... to diamond ring emojis’. Can our heroine bring herself to want that, a complete melding with the class that enslaved hers? For her boyfriend’s father, the Harry-Meghan marriage is ‘inspiring stuff’, but for her? ‘I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ...”

“... of a myth, but it isn’t quite that. The story of Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War would qualify as a myth, but the Odyssey does not, if a myth is a story that doesn’t depend for its resonance and power on the details and language of any one version. The Penelopiad is written very precisely in response not to the myth of Odysseus, but to ...”

“... politics before this; few of them had been on previous marches. I asked about the 2003 Stop the War march: ‘I was 11,’ they said: ‘I was 13 or 14.’ Everyone has plenty of reasons for being there: they want Malcolm Grant, the provost, to reverse his enthusiastic position on tuition fees, or to bring his £424,000 salary down in line with Oxford and ...”

“... She admired his ‘simple lines’, adding that ‘he taught me what was necessary.’ After the war she arranged to have the whole interior brought to London, where the architect (and fellow refugee) Ernst Freud adapted it to fit her mews house in Paddington. It took huge effort, a lot of money and many bureaucratic manoeuvres to get it out of Vienna, but ...”