“... what George Orwell, an old Etonian, called in The Road to Wigan Pier the ‘lower-upper-middle-class’, his family’s shabby-genteel world peopled by clerics, servicemen and Anglo-Indian officials who were reduced to living on ‘virtually working-class incomes’. Pratt’s antecedents are in trade and business and ...”

“... is concerned with the final integration of the hero’s metropolitan present with his working-class Welsh childhood. The novel concludes, homiletically, with the following exchange:   ‘It was bound to be a difficult journey.’   ‘Yes certainly. Only now it seems like the end of exile. Not going back, but the feeling of exile ending. For the ...”

“... Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book, first published in 1940 and hugely popular after the war, offered a similar idyll in its description of the humble lives of Oriental peasant craftsmen to the one David evoked in the olive groves of Greece, appealing to readers who had no more intention of building their own tunnel kilns than David’s had of ...”

“... wing ear’ for dialogue. According to Cockburn, who often drank with him during the war, this caused him to startle violently at unexpected moments. ‘My God,’ he would say, abruptly tuned in to someone standing eight feet away with his back to them, ‘don’t you see the sort of thing he is up to? God help us.’ If he wasn’t of the ...”

“... processes and civil rights; on the other, their arrival was the first unequivocal post-war success for Fascism in the arena of ‘normal’ politics. Similarly, in a United States in which Idaho voters sent to Congress the egregious Republican Linda Cherno-with – a woman who holds every kooky belief that drives the militia movement – one may be ...”

“... was ‘repugnant’? Nicolson ‘was only attracted by younger, intellectual men of his own class’, though he seems to have had ‘some commerce’ in Berlin ‘with what he called the lower orders’. But in the second part of his career, in journalism and politics, the narrowness of his social sympathies mast have brought some penalties. He seems to ...”

“... an idyll on a southern coast, some interesting experiences in Germany during the Second World War. But it is a long journey and, after 1050 pages, one may be left wishing it had been slightly shorter. Giovene seems to have put everything in, banal incidents as well as interesting ones, boring people along with some good characters, and he does it all in a ...”

“... themes (194 appeared between 1884 and 1920 alone), its members were a polyglot mixture of middle-class socialists, free-thinkers and advanced liberals whose lack of involvement in the organised working-class movement was one of its characteristic features. At the same time, British intellectuals of the Left never had an ...”

“... and against Hindu fundamentalism. I listened to the various ways, small and big, in which middle-class Hindus had been infuriated by Muslims – the recitation of prayers five times a day on loudspeakers; the Shah Bano case, where a Muslim woman pleaded to be divorced under civil rather than Muslim law (her plea was upheld by the Supreme Court, but overruled ...”

“... Labour autobiography with titles like ‘From Crowscaring to Westminster’, ‘From Workshop to War Cabinet’, which expressed something admirable about their subjects. ‘From Grantham to the Ritz’ isn’t quite that. The procession of Tory grandees on TV reminding us how Thatcher saved the economy, rescued the country from the anarchy of the ...”

“... and secret meetings – which were known to everybody.’ After the élite came the ‘middle class’ of non-Communist political prisoners, social democrats, bourgeois lackeys and churchmen. The ‘lower middle class’ consisted of rank-and-file gaolbirds, from criminals to Jehovah’s Witnesses. The ...”

“... culture back over ground where he had earlier seen ‘the making of the English Working Class’; the hugely original Witness against the Beast (1993) about Blake; the far less noticed Alien Homage (1993), about his father’s see-saw relationship with Rabindranath Tagore (his father, also Edward Thompson: Indianist, novelist, Georgian ...”

“... and surprising figure to emerge in Iraq since the US invasion’. Unusually among writers on the war Cockburn describes the milieu from which al-Sadr comes and its history, as well as the world which has created his thousands of followers: a world so remote from the experiences not only of the foreign forces which have occupied Iraq, but also of many of the ...”

“... Bermondsey off, creating a ‘no-go’ area for the Police and Army. ‘For nine days, the working class administered all of Bermondsey.’ It was under workers’ control! It is clearly a stirring history and it is easy to see its appeal for the young Australian left-wing idealist. Alienated from his own country, both because of his homosexuality (then ...”

“... the national ‘we’, but a miscellany of difference, where speech, circumstance, colour, sex and class suggest the experiences of exclusion, of otherness. The political travelogue has a long tradition in British literature, and at its best represents a quest to reinstate the voices which are suppressed in the rhetoric of reactionary nationalism, the subjects ...”