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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... only with the age of reason. From then on, ‘the only prolonged period of separation was the war and its immediate aftermath.’ For those years he has drawn largely on correspondence, which makes this part of the book among the most illuminating. Philip regards C.P. as ‘the main influence’ in his life, and the admirer is as much in evidence as 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 ...”

“... instalment is promised in the near future. Appropriately enough, one of the volumes is called The War of Words. In this case, at least, it is a battle Briggs has not always won. Yet the shortcomings are far outweighed by the strengths, chief among which is the simple but essential truth that Briggs has been almost as much the maker of Victorian England in our ...”

“... playing cricket.’ The tragedy was dealt with as most tragedies were dealt with in English middle-class homes at that time: no one talked about it. This memoir is an act of restitution, an attempt to bring his mother into view from where ‘she has been airbrushed out of the historical record, like one of Stalin’s victims.’ But the talking doesn’t come ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Black attendees, and reacted indignantly to the UTN’s interpretation that ‘the French working class had allowed itself to be co-opted by imperialism.’ At a mass demonstration for Ethiopia in Trafalgar Square a few months later, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta approached the colonialism question more subtly. ‘You have talked of the ...”

“... which were not praiseworthy are firmly placed in the past. The louse-ridden condition of World War One uniforms and the horrors of child labour in the early mills are shown definitively as ‘once upon a time’. But there are some immediate accounts of what was going on: for instance, the shocked description of the ‘unnatural’ activities in New Lanark ...”

“... a distinctively Protestant, even a distinctively Christian nation. There is no great likelihood of war with a European nation, no obvious enemy without; no empire; no commercial supremacy; no obvious new ground on which to rebuild the national identity of Britain. Whether the Union can survive without a clearer sense of what it is there for; whether Britain ...”