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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was by contrast very approachable and friendly, ‘a tough old Clydeside revolutionary’ and a war hero with a partly wooden foot and a special medal, who had educated himself into ‘a passionate interest in literature’. When the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s ...”

“... not mean that it is wrong. There are good arguments for it, the strongest of which come from just-war theory. If you accept that wars fought as a last resort by legitimate authority with the sole intention of responding to unprovoked aggression with proportionate force are justifiable, then there are circumstances in which you may find yourself supporting ...”

“... one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in the ...”

“... ago. His Berlin family belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum – roughly, the well-educated middle class – and rejected Hitler and National Socialism from the very first moment. They were not part of any resistance group; they did nothing ‘active’ to damage the Nazi dictatorship. They simply refused to let this dirty, vulgar, evil thing across the ...”

“... Asked by a number of interviewers to talk about their childhoods in England before the First World War, they offer notes on families, schools and factories, on nursery teas and crocheting and ringworm. They talk a little about their feelings, less about their fantasies. Collected together to make a bag of recollections, their observations are presented less as ...”