“... commissioned reports on subjects ranging from George VI’s coronation to the Munich crisis, from war work to religious belief. Buffeted by financial troubles and leadership crises (Madge broke with MO in 1940; Harrisson was conscripted in 1942 and sent to Borneo in 1944), by the late 1940s the organisation was in decline, although Harrisson could usually be ...”

“... On​ 14 April 1988, right at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a US navy frigate, Samuel B. Roberts, hit a mine and was badly damaged. Ten of the crew were injured. The US blamed Iran – even though Iraq had been just as active in laying mines – and attacked the Iranian navy, sinking the frigate Sahand and the fast attack craft Joshan ...”

“... counts’. Blundering through the ironies, we gather that the Abyss means the world of the working class, the world of most people, and that Forster was suggesting that it was impossible in 1910 for gentlefolk and novelists to connect with that large world – ‘that huge body of individuals that generally goes by the name of the People’, as Hazlitt put ...”

“... this record on 1 January 1946. He had, however, kept a diary before, during the years of the war, and abandoned it only three months earlier, so he starts here with a practised hand. The wartime diaries have already been published, as Ancestral Voices and Prophesying Peace, and time will show whether this is a conclusion or merely an episode in a ...”

“... opinions. He is provoked by young Higgins arguing that Stephen Crane is not writing about war but about ‘the emotional and intellectual maturing of a young man’. Smiricky reads out a military passage from Crane’s book, The Red Badge of Courage (mentally comparing the fiction with a real-life experience in the 1940s), but then he is distracted by ...”

“... a secure chronological framework while they ventured forth into the vast unknowns of social class, religious denomination and regional culture. Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a landmark here, and we now possess histories of feminism, pacifism, of the movements against slavery and ...”

“... years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown ...”

“... Theory; and from its birth in the Weimar Republic to its later flight to New York and post-war return to Frankfurt, it sustained a tenacious if turbulent institutional existence through the advent of Fascism, the defeat of socialism, the Second World War and the ideological freeze-over which followed on its ...”

“... decay of the commonwealth.’ In the matter of clothing, the sumptuary laws of the Second World War were directed at less dandiacal, but still state-threatening, indulgences: double-breasted jackets, double cuffs, turn-ups of all kinds, patch pockets, bellows pockets, belts, yokes, pleats, shirrs, flaps, tabs and all unnecessary adornment (one historian ...”

“... Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh.’ He was an ‘unusually ...”

“... except that it is directed against the Red Flag. Some of the irony detected in this, by the pundit class and by reliable supporters of the President and Prime Minister, is superficial. In several of the countries of Eastern Europe, and potentially in Russia also, the wave of emancipation contains ideas that are not at all alien to Eurosocialism, and to the ...”

“... W. Burgess, and a future Los Angeles segregated along the stratifying dimensions of land value, class, race and fear. A ‘Core City’ homeless containment zone sits at the centre of an inner city surrounded by a circle of decaying blue-collar suburbs, then a gated-suburban, edge-city, outer ring, and finally a ‘gulag rim’ of prisons. The map is dotted ...”

“... relations to the effect that the problems facing the country in the aftermath of the Second World War were such that no government would be able to address them without losing popularity, so that the Conservatives could plausibly look forward to being returned as the unintended beneficiaries next time round. It was, in its way, a prophetic remark. But the ...”

“... two Jewish families, the Katzes and the Gordons, fled from Odessa and settled in pre-First World War Liverpool. Within their ethnic class and shared past they are markedly different. The Gordons are adaptable and individualistic – sharp even against each other. The Katzes are a warmer, happier, less steady family. The ...”

“... At college I took a class in writing short stories. It’s a long time ago, but it stands out among the things that were happening to me at the time; and have happened, or not happened, since. The instructor always wanted us to be dry and precise. No gush please was his watchword. I was feeling pretty dry myself, so I thought I should be able to manage that ...”