“... no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James Campbell McInnes, a man of working-class origins who became the foremost British lieder-singer of his generation. Unfortunately for this marriage of the muses and the classes, Campbell McInnes was ...”

“... the pain. Growl like the base animal you really are. The women who ‘do’ NCT are mostly middle class, but they are encouraged through anecdotes and videos to believe that the model to emulate is that of working-class or ‘ethnic’ women, who supposedly give birth more easily; they take a break from scrubbing the floor ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mother. In the novel Stalin’s rape of the Ukraine is linked to the activities of Ukrainian war criminals who, in revenge for the atrocities visited on them by those they identified as Jewish Bolsheviks, collaborated in the Holocaust, serving as guards at Treblinka and taking part in the massacre of Babi Yar. The Hand That Signed the Paper went on to ...”

“... Memmi’s powerful account of the psychodynamics of colonialism was written during the Algerian War, but also in the wake of Tunisian independence. Colonialism, for Memmi, was ‘one variety of fascism’, and its key tools were racism and terror. The Algerian War was a clear demonstration of that. But in The Coloniser ...”

“... individually, it may be, want to be caring or cultured or classless, or to belong to a particular class. The three C’s are for other people. In repudiating the categories, we repudiate, in one sense, the society we live in – a very practical example of Marxian alienation. And a significant one, because caring, culture and ...”

“... of the Congress for Cultural Freedom – an enterprise that began honourably before the war as a committee of socialist intellectuals opposed to Stalinism, and ended squalidly during the Cold War as a conduit for the covert CIA funding of Encounter and other reliably anti-Soviet journals and organisations. Even ...”

“... in Britain has never achieved. What was the pattern of this victory? In West Germany after the war, religion was always the most reliable index of the regional strengths of Right and Left. Christian Democracy was inter-confessional, but invariably predominated in the Catholic South – Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Rhine-Palatinate; whereas Social ...”

“... a former teacher from a genteel background was a fraud: she tormented her bluff and genial working-class husband, and forced her children to hate him; she was rightly ostracised by her neighbours for her disdainful self-righteousness; she ‘cruelly victimised’ her hapless rival, Jessie Chambers; and so the character-assassination goes on. Meyers portrays ...”

“... a nation’s story’ – the culmination of which is the establishment of a wealthy black middle class: tangible evidence of triumph over adversity. The trade in commodified human beings was, however, integral to a global, not national, project of colonial modernity. As African and Indigenous peoples were dispossessed and subjugated, a multiplicity of ...”

“... preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold Warrior. His rhetorical assaults on the ‘evil empire’, coupled with a relentless military build-up, had pushed the Soviet Union into an unwinnable arms race, destabilised its economy and ...”

“... Empire and Parliament remained robust until well into the 20th century. With the Second World War, it became stronger than ever, not least because old prejudices about the Continental ‘Other’ were reconfirmed. Two hundred years after ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed before the Prince of Wales, Britain once again, in the summer of 1940, proved ...”

“... the commander of the Hungarian army, or of Count Baillet von Latour, the Habsburg minister of war, in Vienna. They can also be very funny: Count Stadion, the gentlemanly Austrian viceroy in Prague, driving a revolutionary delegation crazy by fiddling with his pince-nez and burbling on about what a pleasure it was to meet such competent ...”

“... habit of secrecy and prevarication’. In 1911 a colonial wrangle brought Europe within sight of war: our world resounds with White House sabre-rattling, eagerly echoed by a clattering of knitting-needles from Downing Street. The book is put together on a plan adapted to its practical purpose. Its scrutiny of the second Moroccan crisis is firmly based on the ...”

“... 1871; the continued dominance of aristocratic elites over a socially and politically supine middle class; the entrenched power of the traditionally authoritarian and belligerent Prussian military tradition – in short, everything, they argued, that had come by the outbreak of the First World War to distinguish Germany from ...”