“... During the Spanish Civil War the Communist Party established a stranglehold over the Republican Government and Army. They were able to do this for many reasons. First, they could present themselves as the collaborators of the Soviet Union, the chief provider of armaments. They acted as agents for the International Brigades ...”

“... devoted to a single subject and are written by a single author. Both are concerned with working-class life in that area to the north and east of Liverpool Street Station, extending in an arc from Bethnal Green via Spitalfields to Whitechapel, famous in its day for such do-badding criminals as Jack the Ripper, and for such do-gooding enterprises as Toynbee ...”

“... and connubium. In Western societies they have operated within the cultural framework of class. Kenneth Ballhatchet takes the equally familiar notion that in colonial societies alien minority rule translated class distinctions into those of race. In India he sees the social aloofness of the ruling white minority as ...”

“... a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the course of some fifty years. From the perspective, by turns, of parents and children, she contemplated the complexities and banalities of relations among family members against the political background of the ...”

“... In the chilly spring of 1958, with war still a vivid memory and rationing an even more recent one, queues were a familiar sight. But the line that formed in front of the railings of Buckingham Palace on 18 March was peculiar enough to attract a small crowd of onlookers. There, shivering in silk and chiffon, the debutantes waited with their mothers and fathers to curtsey to the queen ...”

“... In the lustrum after World War Two the word ‘commitment’ got almost as much work as ‘existential’ in literary magazines. The words represented opposite attitudes to the writer’s stance in relation to the world around him. A literary existentialist owed a little, but not much, to Kierkegaard’s belief in the free and responsible individual discovering his spiritual essence through acts of will ...”

“... Hitchens, in his attack upon me, says that I regretted the defeat of Germany in the Second World War. On the contrary, in my view the greatest tragedy for us would have been the defeat of our own country. My opposition to the war in 1939 was based on the fact, as obvious to many people then as it is to everyone now, that ...”

“... to place that euphoria more firmly than we did at the time in the context of the Second World War. We were the children of that war. And it was the direness of the 1950s for women, another backlash after the war’s liberating potential, which precipitated the feminism that was to ...”

“... the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. In April, the House of Commons responded by voting for war with France. Initially, that war, which would continue intermittently for much of the next century, was fought in Ireland. The campaigns of 1689-91 bequeathed to modern Ireland many of its most important lieux de ...”

“... Lilla, a self-declared ‘centrist liberal’, arrived at his present position by way of working-class Detroit, evangelical Christianity and an early flirtation with neoconservatism. The British writers belong to a traditional elite; shared privilege transcends ideological discrepancies between centrist liberalism and nativism, the Financial Times and the ...”

“... the start the dominating presence, and poetically he increasingly came to be seen as being in a class of his own. MacNeice was, in truth, always an awkward recruit to this team, both poetically and politically, and he has enjoyed a revived standing in his own right in recent decades thanks to the attention of a later generation of Ulster-born poets and ...”

“... demolished but once brave new Quarry Hill Flats (into which his mother had refused to move as a war-widowed evacuee from London), he boards an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of ...”

“... by them. This and later moments in the film are dated by the start and end of the American Civil War (1861-65), when the girl is a grown-up. The adult Vivienne is wonderfully played by Vicky Krieps. Vivienne asks her mother why men fight. Her mother says there are reasons, and they both return to their reading of a book about Joan of Arc, another ...”

“... like to complain, Prussia was the only state abolished by the victors after the Second World War. Brandenburg was dissolved into the German Democratic Republic; West Prussia became Polish; East Prussia was partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union, which annexed the coastal region around the capital, Königsberg (renamed ...”

“... himself as the patron and protector of the ex-serviceman ever after. The experience of imperialist war and mass slaughter, which had a radicalising effect upon so many of all classes, was also to interest some ill-assorted people in Fascism. Henry Williamson’s later sympathy with the Reich, for instance, had much to do with his consuming horror of the ...”