“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and cultural change. One reads so often of the gloom and despondency of the British after the war that it is heartening to be told that they were probably enjoying themselves as never before. Detachment leads on to revisions. Morgan is a revisionist in several directions, not least in reshuffling the well-thumbed pack of ministerial reputations. In recent ...”

“... go with the food. He ends by wrapping the lot in a newspaper and bolting. Bevin completely lacked class-consciousness – in the crabbed sense of the term, though he took a natural pride in his humble origins. He once told his Private Secretary’s wife that he used to collect washing from her mother’s house. Nobody dreamt of disapproving of him, and the ...”

“... than they have been before. Two thirds of the novel is set around the Black Sea during the Crimean War, and the chaotic conditions in the camps there, as well as the number of people Bainbridge suggests travelled out for reasons other than actual fighting, mean that there’s more scope for chance to seem to have a dominant role. The plot, especially in its ...”

“... answer is that the Bush administration draws its political support not from America’s corporate class generally, but rather from a particular part of it: ‘the sprawling disaster capitalism complex’. She has in mind the companies that reap huge profits from catastrophes, both man-made and natural. They include defence contractors, arms dealers, high-tech ...”

“... Last month, two days after the war on the Reef between Inkatha and the ANC erupted in Soweto, the families in Klipspruit Extension were moving out. The windows had been smashed in every single house on the dusty road through this respectable, middle-class development. Dozens of well-dressed middle-class Sowetans were loading mattresses, tables, cushions, chairs and pictures onto pick-up trucks and roof racks ...”

“... against the moral perils of a market economy. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, was ‘surely the most widely read and most influential work of history published in English during the 20th century’. Thompson, like Tawney, lamented the social destruction wreaked by the free market, in his case during the Industrial ...”

“... started in the coal industry, which had powered industrialisation, empire and the First World War, but after 1918 lurched from crisis to crisis. Coal could hardly be called a single industry: in 1926 there were nearly 2500 collieries, producing different grades of coal under different conditions, using different processes. Most mines were lamentably ...”

“... to be taken foremost) is A Sort of Clowning by Richard Hoggart, perhaps the most usefully class-conscious English writer of our time. He created an accepted general idea of the British ‘working class’ in 1957, with The Uses of Literacy. He developed his concept, most recently, in his memoir, A Local ...”

“... Britons on the home front in the Second World War bore the sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing, which were intended to constrain the demand for precious consumables, ensure their quality and allow them to be shared out equally ...”

“... informs us – he is rather keen on such things – his subject learned about ‘the English class system’; it may be added that he learned by the usual method of noticing those who were richer than himself rather than by being enlightened as to the advantages he himself enjoyed. When war broke out in 1914, he was in ...”

“... gnawing hunger.I imagine Emma Griffin chose to open her engaging history of 19th-century working-class family economics with the story of the O’Mearas because it suggests what was structural and inescapable about their trajectory but also what was a consequence of personality and luck. The labour market and the wage system were both structured by ...”

“... grasp of what’s happening in the country. When his uncle asks, ‘You have heard that there is war in Eastern Region, abi?’ he shakes his head. He’s a lonely, ‘hermitic’ sort of boy. Since his transistor radio ran out of batteries, he hasn’t kept up with current events. Now term is over there’s no excuse for him not to visit his parents, who ...”