“... 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 ...”

“... 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 Booker Prize for Saville; enlarging the scope of British literary culture to encompass working-class life and national malaise and a stymied sense of imperial memory. His influence has never been credited in his afterlife the way it was when he was alive. Other British novels and plays of the era are better remembered, but Storey’s work was deeper and ...”

“... Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post ...”

“... and confidence were enormously increased. Although Campbell argues that in the long term the war represented an almost insane misdirection of priorities, Thatcher emerges from his account rather well. However much her government was responsible for what happened, she plainly couldn’t not do anything. She was in addition a good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shall participate in the struggle of the workers and sincere intellectuals against imperialist war, fascism, national and racial oppression, and for the abolition of the system which breeds these evils. The defence of the Soviet Union is one of our principal tasks. We shall combat not only the decadent culture of the exploiting classes but also the ...”

“... members of my generation, I grew up in the shadow of a more recent calamity, the American-led war to remove Saddam Hussein, which opened up the country to both regional terrorism and the global market economy.The enduring impact of war, poverty and neoliberal transformation are visible everywhere. Late Ottoman areas of ...”

“... Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa’s only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the ‘anarchists’. Damaging property and street fighting proved the most effective forms of protest, and provoked an over-reaction from the police: they shot a man armed with a fire extinguisher and ...”

“... tasks that would later be done exclusively by blacks. Political prisoners from the English Civil War were sent directly into West Indian slavery, and poorer whites were encouraged (by destitution, misleading advertising or organised kidnapping) to become field hands in Virginia and the Caribbean. By the end of the century, this had become impossible. Slavery ...”

“... introduction to the third revision of what was once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold ...”

“... prejudice and hatred. It might have been invoked to describe, for example, a motive behind the war against Nazi Germany, the current activities of the Commission for Racial Equality in this country, or concern in Japan for the contemptuous treatment meted out there to Korean immigrants. Recently, however, ‘anti-racism’ has come to be associated with a ...”