“... 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 ...”

“... Reflecting on the cultural consequences of the Civil War, the Southern literary critic, Lewis Simpson, wonders how Emerson, the quintessential New England intellectual, could have failed to understand that ‘in their progress as the representation of the idea of emancipation, Americans had become engaged in a bloody emancipation of a second American republic – a modern nation-state – from the political order that, with nostalgic affection, would come to be thought of as the “Old Republic” ...”

“... economy, the insecurity and uncertainties of a drifting Japanese urban population in the post-war years. And, in the last sentence, a purely visual sense of distance from a character, brought about as if by the lens of a camera, coincides with an odd but touching intrusion of closeness, kinship and ‘sympathy’. In An Artist of the Floating ...”

“... is to study Irish nationalist perceptions of Unionists, especially the Protestant working class; it is to study the tortuous, tense and ill-defined relationship between socialism and Irish nationalism; and it is to study the role of Catholicism in Irish social and cultural life. There are few historical figures in whom the dilemmas, conundrums and ...”

“... 50 per cent of us, if we were male, and 40 per cent, if we were female, reached a higher social class than our parents, against less than 20 per cent who went in the other direction. It was an exceptional climb towards opportunity and prosperity that for a time looked like the way life would always be.On a Monday in late August 1956, somewhere around two ...”

“... demeanour suggests – replied: ‘Well, you ought to know how hard it is to lead the working class, Malachy.’ The Official IRA emerged after the IRA split in 1969, soon after the Troubles began; the other, more prominent group that came into being was the Provisional IRA. Those who joined the Provos felt that in the 1960s the IRA had moved too far from ...”

“... come across the crypto-Etonian columnist with the Tyneside accent and the warm loyalty to working-class experience, or the swaggering Texan brute of a newshound, festooned with body-armour and film pouches, who began life as the only child of a Harvard professor of literature. Why this guising is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon press world is hard to explain. It ...”

“... in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; a recession from 1580 to 1610, and again in the Civil War decade, followed by a new advance in the 1650s, and a slowing down after 1660. The initial rapid rise may perhaps be attributed to a new emphasis on Bible-reading; the other fluctuations probably derive from economic factors – though the stagnation after ...”

“... of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On ...”

“... in Mexico after the turn of the century. Though most people chose to ignore the fact after the war, the Beetle was a Nazi car. Hitler was determined to bring Germany up to what he saw as the level of modernity of advanced economies like Britain and America (Rieger’s account is another nail in the coffin of the old interpretation of Nazism as a ...”

“... Out​ of every hundred working-class men considered for military service at the end of the 19th century, 33 were rejected. The poor health of soldiers fighting in the Boer War made the state of the nation’s young men a matter of public concern. The blame wasn’t put on urban poverty, however, but on ‘ignorance on the part of mothers of the necessary conditions of bringing up healthy children’, as Major General Sir Frederick Maurice put it ...”

“... As President of the Board of Trade in the wartime coalition, he laid the foundations of the post-war Labour Government’s regional policies. As chairman of the policy sub-committee of the National Executive, he did more than anyone else to shape the economic strategy on which the Labour Party fought the 1945 Election. He wrote 12 books, one of which ran to ...”

“... In Britain privilege still means power, but power no longer means class. The British ruling class is long since dead. Its day was over when neoliberal think tanks dethroned liberal-humanist intellectuals and nobody was any longer interested in how to combine Adam Smith with the Bible, or the rule of the many with the wisdom of the few ...”

“... of the British Parliamentary élite which made very evident both the decline of direct working-class representation among Labour MPs and the rise of an upwardly mobile middle class. As I ploughed through one biography after another, however, I became painfully aware of the generational limits to mobility. The perfect ...”