“... in the late 1920s, wriggling uneasily but divertingly in the generation gap of her time and class. Her parents’ generation seems to be stuck in the mud of the grouse moors: tough as old boots, the elders blaze away, pausing to reminisce about World War One and the filthy Hun. Her young friends (rather ...”

“... self-consciousness. The past is drawn upon selectively, compounding nationhood, cultural heritage, class identity or historical destiny in the creation of a necessary myth. The myth may be necessary in order to fortify the ambitions of the restless, to gratify the complacency of the satisfied or to console the amour-propre of the dispossessed. The functions of ...”

“... in 12 deaths and at least 37 injuries, shed light on the violent groups that peppered working-class communities and provided the foot soldiers for New York’s Democratic Party. Most subsequent accounts construed the Dead Rabbit-Bowery Boy Riot as the most violent in a string of battles between Irish and nativist gangs and an extension of the struggle ...”

“... and well-fed. All three are ecstatic with the happiness of finding each other alive again after a war in which the family at home had been as likely to be killed as the soldier at the front. The war was over, the valleys would bloom again, and Johnny would go to sleep in his own little room again. It was a good moment to be ...”

“... of the era. Here is Wilkinson as the pioneer socialist and feminist at the heart of working-class culture, a left-wing Labour MP who respected the parliamentary road to socialism. But there is another Wilkinson in Laura Beers’s biography who could easily be claimed by those who have taken charge of Labour since the 2015 election. As an undergraduate ...”

“... of leftists, became a quiet American statistician. Some refugees returned to Europe after the war, leaving no mark on American letters. ‘Farewell, America,’ wrote Alfred Döblin as he steamed out of New York. ‘You were not very fond of me./But I love you still.’ Others laboured on projects that would see the light of day much later, Ernst ...”

“... ran a ferocious campaign as an independent, which broke new ground by rallying the white working class against intellectuals and anti-war hippies. Though always less popular than Johnson, Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic Democratic National Convention. And finally, Richard Nixon demonstrated how many ...”

“... and Albanians in Kosovo aren’t really Europeans?) Mazower reminds us of the record of total war, totalitarian persecution, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide – all done by Europeans to Europeans. In Europe as a whole, some 60 million people were killed by state-sponsored violence in the first half of this century. In East Central Europe alone, in ...”

“... of view, Ford, as Green depicts him, was in a quandary. He found himself, at the time of the Boer War, bitterly hostile to the encroachments of ‘collectivism’, both the Webbs’ variety and that imperialist collectivism represented by Joseph Chamberlain. Yet he had little viable or credible to offer as an alternative – at most, a vague romanticism about ...”

“... cities and the loss of life is beginning to be counted. The young soldiers who came back from the war are turning into loyal corporation men, eager to forget the Imperial past and to dedicate the remainder of their lives to resurgent capitalism. Ishiguro’s narrator, Masuji Ono, has lost his wife and son but lives on with two daughters, one of whom is ...”

“... 19th century, and as the historian Stuart Ward has shown, was widely adopted after the First World War by European intellectuals as they reckoned with imperial decline. From their perspective, decolonisation was the natural telos of empire, and the rise of a post-imperial world order would represent not its defeat but its finest achievement.Within a few weeks ...”

“... conscience. But Christianity never entered the marrow. His personal journey from upper-middle-class norms to committed socialism was similarly tentative. Indeed, its point of departure was militaristic public school loyalty. In October 1905 Attlee and his brother Laurence – out of a sense of duty to their former school – visited the Haileybury Club in ...”

“... of employment in schools, offices and town halls made it possible for single women of the middle class to escape the bleak alternatives posed by Early Victorian England – being a governess or remaining dependent on the parental family – and an increasing number of flats and restaurants catered to their new needs. At the same time, it appears that in all ...”

“... entrée. Even the Russian novel cannot get in, as it was able to do without effort in the days of War and Peace and Resurrection, following the novels of Balzac and Scott. A contemporary novel like Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat uses the old tradition, alternating domestic and family matters with scenes in the Kremlin and among the Soviet bigwigs. But the ...”

“... the history of the Communist movement can properly be understood, particularly in its pre-Cold War heyday. About Turn is a tough book to read, even for those of us who maintain a perverse fascination with the affairs of the British Communist Party (and what a surprisingly large number of us there are – a further sign of Communism’s many-sided ...”