“... soldier grew more extravagant from campaign to campaign, from Quebec through the Peninsular War, from Waterloo to the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the two world wars. In the Napoleonic Wars, Devine estimates, some 50,000 Highlanders were recruited from a region with a population of fewer than 300,000. Queen Victoria adored her Highland warriors, and so ...”

“... means both Catholic (read, if you like, ‘Roman Catholic’) and Protestant, and both working-class and middle-class. Mid-Ulster has a fifty-fifty religious split, and was for a long time extremely poor. Its unemployment was the worst in the province, at a time when the province’s unemployment was the worst in Western ...”

“... make what Hitler did ‘look like an evil child’s fumbling toys’.A prophetess, then, a high-class soothsayer? It’s true that Arendt quotes, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in particular, were conspicuous in the cheese dreams of the US media during the Trump presidency. Was it or wasn’t it totalitarian? Was he or wasn’t he a ...”

“... at least 500 photographs between 1910 and the 1950s – using the same ultra-primitive pre-World War One Kodak Folding Pocket Camera. Neither possessed sophisticated darkroom skills: they sent their negatives to professional processing laboratories on Jersey or else in London or Paris. The local jobbing men managed to produce some thrilling results (one ...”

“... from questions about the state’s ability to make and carry out decisions in its self-interest in class societies to questions of its contingent relationship with the entity of the nation that today is its main source of legitimacy. Further, it specifies a continuum in which the nation-state is placed at a mid-point between two poles. At one end are ...”

“... opposition to the Suez adventure and its slightly less forthright distaste for the Falklands War. Inevitably, he quotes C.P. Scott’s famous dictum that ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’ – a sentence which is often paraphrased by snide critics on richer newspapers as ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive.’ But he leaves little doubt ...”

“... uneasy study of the author’s father, who seems to have accepted it patiently: away during the war, he was in the usual way resented by his son on his return; later he amazed him by obeying a call to the Anglican ministry. Also worth mentioning are the mildly hilarious account of the aged Freya Stark proceeding down the Euphrates on a raft, and pieces ...”

“... plenty from these neighbours, more than from their humbler brethren. A consequence was that the class relations and conflicts which were the staple of history in Europe could have no unfolding in Jewry. All the while, however, records of community life were accumulating, and very revealing use is made of them in the massive set of essays dedicated to the ...”

“... star pupil, publishing stories and poems in both the university literary magazine and higher-class publications like Prairie Schooner and Texas Monthly. But after losing enough odd jobs to stuff the résumé of any prospective novelist (stenographic temp, door-to-door salesman, bill-collector, oil-rig foreman) Thompson started making his living as a ...”

“... Burdened by the law, by self-discipline, by introspection, by a classical education and upper-class mores, Adair shuts himself into the dark hut with his opposite, bog-Irish riff-raff itself, the man of violent instinct who gives off a rank animal smell. This is an old and well-worked dichotomy for Malouf, all of whose novels, from his first, Johnno, in ...”

“... with the Big House was a remote fact of history; they belonged to the Protestant merchant class, and neither the Yeatses nor the Pollexfens, who were fairly rich, had genuine aristocratic pretensions. In the midst of Catholic Sligo they were bourgeois and Protestant, but also Irish and proud of it. Yet Yeats declined to think of himself as an Irish ...”

“... and defiance rather than as escape, a mystical as well as a political union with the working class (working, but for the moment unemployed). Lehmann kept them more or less happy with money, clothes, cigarette-lighters and fountain-pens. It was, as he wrote himself, ‘a contact with earthiness that I needed very badly’. He desired wholeness, and ...”

“... in Henry Fielding, who was not only a novelist, a playwright and a magistrate but a prolific high-class journalist and editor. In his day there were no book reviews as such, though books might be discussed along with other matters of topical interest. Soon, in the mid-century, a more specialised literary journalism took hold. The preferred style was of ...”

“... of Lady with the Red Lamp, imaginatively caring for the wanking-wounded, the casualties of the sex war. But there are many differences between her set-up in Streatham and the predicament of streetwalkers like Carol and Sharon. For one thing, she doesn’t – or didn’t during her years as a madam – need to simulate any sort of submission to the horny ...”

“... There are occasional flights of millennial fancy about the imminent unity of the Northern working class, but that is about all. The basic unreality of Northern policy has been underlined, as never before, by the controversy about the proposed amendment to the Constitution on the question of abortion. Just before the first General Election of 1981, a small ...”