“... God and Ulster’ (and many of whom diversified into gangsterism) are threatening to go back ‘to war’. Others are more pragmatic. Manufacturing NI, a campaign organisation that promotes businesses in Northern Ireland, carried out a poll after the protocol had been in operation for a month. It found that while there had inevitably been disruption – the ...”

“... Liberal Democrats will provide safe refuge for swing voters in the South disgusted by culture war sadism; if the SNP’s finance scandal festers Labour might even regain some of its former Scottish bastions. The nation is miserable and conditions are favourable, but this hardly diminishes Starmer’s achievement: he has isolated the left within his ...”

“... of English – seen by Eagleton as a pernicious mystification serving the interests of the ruling class – in the first chapter of his bestseller Literary Theory (1983). But Collini chides Eagleton for misrepresenting a central element in his story and observes that the related thesis of Chris Baldick in The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 ...”

“... made up 2.7 million people, more than a quarter of the population. Within sixty years this social class had all but disappeared. Post-famine shifts in agriculture from tillage to pasture reduced the demand for labour, encouraging further emigration. Tenant farmers, meanwhile, began to challenge landlords for greater rights to their holdings. They ultimately ...”

“... After numerous moves back and forth across the country, they finally settled in working-class Philadelphia.The original comic-book nut in the family wasn’t Robert but Charles Jr, who, though he never got beyond pencil and crayon, infected his siblings with his mania. Comic-book lovers of Crumb’s generation are often nostalgic for the EC horror ...”

“... political vocabulary. The Iranian Mujahiddin (leftist supporters of Bani Sadr currently waging war upon the Ayatollahs) are described as munafiqin in the official government media. It is a part of this fragmented and turbulent world of political Islam that V.S. Naipaul sets out to investigate in his latest book. His travels take him to ...”

“... movie career of Ronald Reagan, his analysis of The Birth of a Nation and his meditations on Cold War anti-Communist movies are characterised by their lucidity, invention and historical depth. He locates the origins of The Jazz Singer a century before the movie’s release, in the age of Andrew Jackson. As the frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo ...”

“... to do. Then fashions changed, the ‘great women’ were left behind, and the search for working-class heroines began. All our attention is claimed by Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon, of the Revolutionary Republican Women. Is this shift helpful, or productive of real knowledge? Godineau dares to wonder. Certainly, it tells us more about our own concerns ...”

“... life, and in ours. Pandemics, for example, the Trump presidency, #MeToo, exit from Afghanistan and war in Ukraine; and for Batuman personally, as she put it in a recent interview, those five years chart the process of coming to terms with her queer identity in her late thirties. Selin isn’t into history, but history happens anyway, and the challenge for ...”

“... on the important matters being discussed, but the poem ends:Maybe what they say is trueOf war and war’s alarms;But O that I were young againAnd held her in my arms.Thomas Mann comes into all this because, in a lightly sardonic spirit, Yeats took as the epigraph to his poem a phrase from Mann which MacLeish had ...”

“... settling in Highgate. Gellner’s parents were representative of that stratum of educated, middle-class Jews who, profoundly grateful to Britain for providing them with a home, nonetheless continued throughout the war to speak to each other in the language of the now hated enemy. Ernest finished his schooling at St ...”

“... detail of local power and society. Things are not much better when organisations rely on middle-class or English-speaking Iraqis for information. It is not only Ahmed Chalabi who proved to have little idea about the situation in Iraq. Saddam’s regime worked hard to fragment and isolate the population. Religious sheikhs in Karbala do not know how to assess ...”

“... little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention. Considering his belief in leaderless jihad, it’s remarkable that al-Suri ...”

“... fighting. For the British it was, militarily and symbolically, one of the worst disasters of the war. It proved to be an intensely personal disaster for the more than eighty thousand Allied personnel who were captured that day. Worst of all was life in the makeshift camps set up in the jungle for those sent to work on the construction of the railway line ...”

“... The first thing about Harold Macmillan was his bravery, and it was the last thing too. In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus ...”