“... 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 ...”

“... a nine-page appendix illustrating the essence of Leninism. He includes hefty chunks of Lenin on War and Peace, Civil Liberties, Dictatorship and Democracy, giving precise references to his Selected or Collected Works in English and Russian. But he provides no dates, and divorced from his setting in time, Lenin, as a good Marxist, loses almost all of his ...”

“... battered Indonesia’s economy and released the cork that had kept contained religious, ethnic, class and other divisions in this very diverse archipelago. The result was political and social meltdown. The economy, already in a worse state than, say, South Korea’s, shrank by 13 per cent in 1998, and tens of millions of Indonesians fell below the poverty ...”

“... to wind up the Raj, ending the rule of the king-emperor Brigadier Powell had pledged during the war to maintain. He was working in the Conservative Research Department at the time, alongside more worldly, easy-going political aspirants, who mocked his atavistic convictions. It was one thing to oppose the Labour government when it introduced the British ...”

“... continued to have an expansive conception of the imagined nation, at least until the outbreak of war. Barely more than 1 per cent of the Jews who left the Pale of Settlement went to Palestine. Yet the Zionist narrative, whether articulated by Herzl or the popular novelist, playwright and chronicler of the ghetto Israel Zangwill, who took part in public ...”

“... or England is on hold for the foreseeable future. While Britain shifts hesitantly onto a ‘war-footing’, the cultural and economic divides that split the nation in two in the summer of 2016 have been suspended, save for the self-separation of a privileged few who are able to escape to a remote island or hunker down in the country pile for a few ...”

“... word ‘autobiography’, it turns out, hasn’t been around for very long. In 1786, the labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley (‘Lactilla’, from her day job selling milk) published a memoir in which she berated her patron, the evangelical abolitionist Hannah More, for embezzling the proceeds of Yearsley’s own Poems on Several Occasions. Scholars have been ...”

“... in the 1930s; and the first antibiotics became widely available at the end of the Second World War. All these modern drugs were introduced to treat diseases that were well defined and known to be caused by particular organisms. When the Spaniards used cinchona bark to treat fevers in 17th-century Peru, no one knew what caused the diseases that were being ...”

“... in fact, died ‘for King and Country’ and many thoughtful people in the decade after the Great War believed that their sacrifice brought patriotism into disrepute. Carter’s book makes an imaginative effort to reconstruct what Blunt would have felt in the 1930s. No doubt he was moved by the hunger marches, certainly he was stirred by the death of John ...”

“... masterpiece Nuer Religion (1956), of which cynics have remarked that it exhibits the Nuer as first-class Jesuit dialecticians. Now, no specialist would want to question the value of these Cairo essays. Though hard to get at in printed form, they were widely circulated in mimeograph for many years. The evidence for development is less obvious. As E-P himself ...”

“... that is unpopular in Serbia: a 2022 poll showed that a majority of Serbians blame Nato for the war in Ukraine and view Russia as a ‘true ally’. But among the protesters, one of the most common accusations levelled at Vučić is that he has been too accommodating of foreign powers, to his own benefit and to Serbia’s detriment. This critique sometimes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his life in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City – a drab working-class satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”