“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hardest to get into of all in France, in 1939, but became a student there only at the end of the war, at the late age of 27. He never had to leave it, because after having achieved a brilliant agrégation he stayed on as the caïman or tutor in philosophy. He taught in the rue d’Ulm, very conscientiously by all accounts, and he lived there, at first ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interest in steeplechasing, cricket and poetry and also perhaps through a shared experience of war, though my father’s had been briefer and much less horrific.So with Siegfried’s blessing for a couple of hours on a misty November afternoon we patrolled the undulating woods that he had planted up behind Heytesbury House when he bought it, flush for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness and rancour are the hallmarks of sporting clubs and authorities, and sometimes of individual sportsmen too. Sport seems to license people to behave badly in a way they could not hope ...”

“... garage in Poland.With the spring thaw, Chekh’s unit was ordered to advance using the First World War-style tactics developed by the Ukrainian army to chip away at the separatists’ hold on a corner of Donbass in south-eastern Ukraine: digging trenches into no man’s land under shell fire until, as Chekh says, ‘in your binoculars you can see the barcode ...”