“... Crucifixion may issue in resurrection, but is not annulled by it, any more than the horrors of class society are wiped clean by socialism. It’s hard to raise epochal issues in a study containing essays as fine-grained as the ones here. It’s a cliché of tragic theory, for example, that tragic art flourishes most profusely in periods of historical ...”

“... of expertise, all the while keeping in mind the median voter, with his or her everyday middle-class concerns about economic security. By contrast, come November this year, Farage, Johnson and their allies may well have achieved a far greater disruption of the political and economic status quo than Thatcher or Blair ever managed, with a smaller popular ...”

“... Like Farocki, Steyerl is fascinated by the increased automation not only of labour and war but also of seeing and imaging, and by the subjectless operations of information processing. Along with Paglen and Weizman, she bears down on the control by corporations and governments, through satellite imaging and information mining, of what is given to us ...”

“... by him did, arguing that the Ottoman state was strengthened by scriptural injunctions to wage holy war and by prohibitions on wine, which made for more disciplined armies.An alternative explanation for Ottoman ascendance was their alleged use of coercion, the characteristic that led the empire increasingly to be classified as a ‘despotism’. This ...”

“... richly deserving it. His book focuses almost exclusively on dominant white males. Scottish working-class emigrants and soldiers only occasionally get a look in; and the single Scottish woman to receive cameo treatment, the missionary Mary Slessor, is gratuitously and in defiance of her photograph described as ‘plain’. As for those non-whites on the ...”

“... and Carnival, civil disturbance in a Dauphiné city and countryside, merging into civil war in the period of the Wars of Religion. The English of the translations is vivid, often brilliant, probably with direct intervention from the author, whose command of the language is considerable. All three books display a critical intelligence and wide ...”

“... journalist Hutchins Hapgood was asked to speak on what Mabel called ‘Sex Antagonism’, that war between man and woman that she so well understood, and a stenographer was hired to record the conversation. But Hutch was a little drunk when he rose to speak, and the stenographer was not used to his vocabulary or odd juxtapositions. The resulting typescript ...”

“... largely a mirage, and its sentimental pursuit of them alienates its actual supporters. Familial class ties that once bound voters to parties have weakened. Recent research shows that those attracted to challenger parties – both the Greens and Reform – are more likely to say that their preferred party reflects their values and desired policies. In ...”

“... all were that Broughton had managed to get off chiefly because the members of the British upper class stuck together so closely at times of crisis. True, they shot each other in the ear from time to time, but that was clearly a different matter from having the common hangman come along and string up one of their own. Considering how irremediably ...”

“... which Huizinga reads as a living-in-the-past, an escape from the brutalities of 15th-century war. In 1984 Maurice Keen, incidentally a strong admirer of Huizinga, showed with conviction in his Chivalry that the mythology of knighthood had a more positive function: that of softening the brutalities. Again, take the witch craze. Obedient to contemporary ...”

“... versions of London scenes for the lucrative art market, nor a Hogarth, using a far different class of scenes to stir the dormant social conscience of his time. He was not a Shepherd or a Boys either, bent on spreading the good word that ‘metropolitan improvements’ – the upbeat title of a book by James Elmes which Shepherd illustrated – were ...”

“... literary essays. The Cambridge English Tripos had been set up in the aftermath of the First World War. Its leading figures were deeply moved by the Modernist ferment of the times. I.A. Richards was not only a pioneering literary theorist but one of the earliest interpreters of Eliot’s poetry. F.R. Leavis championed Eliot, Pound and D.H. Lawrence, and taught ...”

“... was just 18 years old. It begins: Hello mother! It’s your eldest son back from the nuclear war, well, half of me anyway. How are you mother? Oh it’s good to see you too, considering the fact that your little darling only has one eye now. ‘Army’ may not be a very good poem but it’s altogether preferable to the sentimental sludge and slurry of ...”

“... Rob Roy: Dickson McCunn, the Glasgow merchant of Hunting-tower and Castle Gay, is not in the same class of invention, sympathy or wit as Nicol Jarvie; and none of John Buchan’s heroines is in the same universe as Diana Vernon. As for comparison with Stevenson, one need merely look at the first chapters of Prester John and Treasure Island. But John ...”

“... be a spy. Another spur, this, to enlistment. And if he really was British, where did he fit in the class set-up? Was he a clubland gent up from the shires or was he a big-city chancer, all airs and no substance? Ford’s fictional heroes are usually well-acred but unworldly and he would certainly have wished to be like them. In the matter of money, was he a ...”