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“... they came from Paris’s posher areas. They were not the progeny of the gilets jaunes or working-class Le Pen voters in the dying mill towns of northern France. Many of them would have received their political baptism in La Manif pour tous, which led the opposition to gay marriage legislation in 2013, taking the entire political ...”

“... International Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg shortly after the end of the Second World War, one of the many objects of its attention were the Storm Divisions (Sturm-Abteilungen, SA) of the Nazi movement. The SA, the prosecution alleged, had been a criminal organisation involved in war crimes and crimes against ...”

“... with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was working for New Left Review in London. After hours Edward and I would ...”

“... it for myself when I was the literary editor of the Evening Standard. It was during the Gulf War and my editor, John Leese, said that it would not be appropriate to hold one of the regular literary lunches, meant to be a celebratory occasion, on a morning when – for all we could predict – horrible news of slaughter might be coming in from the ...”

“... devoted to him, a sort of glorified guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great ...”

“... Dyhouse’s book is concerned only with girls, and mainly with those drawn from middle or upper-class circles, although she makes one substantial digression in which she contrasts their educational history with that of their working-class contemporaries in the elementary schools of the day. Stephen Humphries’s story, on ...”

“... soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war. Everything that he wrote has the feel of direct experience, as though the books composed one long autobiography: yet everything is transformed, moulded into meaning, by his fierce moral sense. It’s no wonder that myths grew up about him, or that they still ...”

“... sets of reasons for believing that there was no choice but to fight an opponent who had declared war. Geoffrey Goodman makes the first case: Margaret Thatcher saw the NUM – Arthur Scargill in particular – as the embodiment of all that she held to be endemic in Britain’s economic decline: monopoly trade-unionism in a state industry subsidised well ...”

“... worked almost to death through a succession of illnesses; he lost a lung and seven ribs. After the war he became a film extra, playing a starved-looking prisoner in The Colditz Story, and ended up as Clark Gable’s butler in Hollywood. Macintyre says he got the idea for his book from reading Chapman’s obituary (he died, aged 83, in 1997), but he might just ...”

“... of old movies where pukka chaps had stiff upper lips and stiff moustaches, the whole upper class apparatus from top hats to gardenias in the buttonhole, will remember his father, the actor and playwright Hugh Williams, whom he writes about so affectingly. The actor first flared in Hollywood in the Thirties, disappeared into the Army for the duration of ...”

“... group of military historians which has flourished in this country since the Second World War, John Keegan is outstanding. His talents are remarkable: a wide-ranging and speculative mind; clarity in analysis; a deep understanding of the military community; and enviable descriptive gifts to ensure that his books will be acceptable to that wide ...”

“... political settlement was the only option for our struggle with Israel, but after the Gulf War, and Arafat’s disastrous alliance with Saddam Hussein, I had lost confidence in his ability to represent our national interests. The Oslo Accords were the result of his crippled, but still potent, position, of which the Israelis took full ...”

“... at least an accumulation of items of narrative evidence – for an overt, vigorous and conscious class struggle in the Greek cities, in which the temporary dominance of one class could often only be achieved by violence, frequently with the aid of outsiders. There is a major historical theme here, attempted, for instance ...”

“... as indeed they did. But, as Hitchens again points out, Orwell was gloomily foreseeing the Cold War when most Tories were still hailing Britain’s gallant Soviet ally. And if 1984 is an anti-socialist tract, it seems odd that its author was calling for a united socialist states of Europe on the eve of publishing it. In any case, you do not disown your ...”

“... and merchant navies. Now, at 46, he was employed by the government at Woolwich Arsenal ‘making war medals’, which sounds dismal and more like a postwar employment scheme than a real job. The only two living descendants of this household are me and my younger cousin Geraldine, who has made much more effort with family history. ‘Mars Avenue?’ I ...”