“... One of the sombre gratifications of war, as we have had recent occasion to discover, is solidarity. War taps a longing to still the quarrels of ordinary life for the sake of something in common. This is a more pervasive longing than we like to admit. Even those who speak out against war are not immune to its lure ...”

“... There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... relish for the quirks, twists, stratagems, evasions, paradoxes and ambiguities of the middle-class mind, which is at once universal and his own. The description of that mind in the terms of psychoanalytic theory could have led to the forcing of a mechanical scheme on an infinitely various, recalcitrant reality. In practice, Gay is too sensitive and ...”

“... During the early years of Bolshevik rule (1917-21), when the regime was engaged in a civil war against its political enemies, there were many such jobs to be done. Stalin’s offices multiplied, largely thanks to the patronage of Lenin himself. Yet he remained strangely insecure and highly sensitive to criticism. One source of insecurity was his ...”

“... in any way comparable to that of the Communists. Instead, the searches for a ‘collaborating class’ which will be reliable, even the attempts to create such a class by digging the foundations for a new local bourgeoisie, go on today as they did in Vietnam. Influence is meanwhile exerted by prompting, elbowing, sticks ...”

“... three decades, the makers of American opinion have evaded the full significance of the Vietnam War – the mendacity, the brutality, the futility. The collective amnesia has been exacerbated by a counter-offensive from the right. Like German nationalists after World War One, American revanchists tell a story of a stab in ...”

“... were killed and 14 wounded: that started the revolution. In 1962, after a long and atrocious war, de Gaulle and the bewildered, exhausted French were forced to grant Algeria its independence. Millions of young Frenchmen were sent out to ‘defend’ French Algeria. A few thousand behaved disgracefully: torture was often used to extract information from ...”

“... the textbook model of the battle of total annihilation against Rome at Cannae, but Rome won the war and Carthage lost it. On this subject the little dialogue in Brecht’s Galileo has said the last word: ‘Unhappy the country without heroes!’ – ‘No. Unhappy the country that needs them.’ How much difference did leadership make to the history of ...”

“... eludes them.’ By Victorian ‘politics’ Armstrong means far more than conflicts of party and class. Her understanding of the term includes struggles over sexuality, epistemology, science and theology; and the lines of affiliation and influence she traces among the participants are subtly entangled and shifting. Though there are occasions when her ...”

“... there is also a whole history of helplessness in the gesture: not only the boy’s but that of his class and time and culture and place. The gesture occurs at the end of Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, 1987 – the year of the story is 1944 – but it has echoes and relatives everywhere in French films since the ...”

“... and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition ...”

“... Review Orwell reported that when the authorities tore down railings for scrap they ravaged working-class parks and squares but left upper-class ones alone. When his wife pointed out that this allegation was demonstrably false, he answered that it was ‘essentially true’, rather as he accused pacifists of being ...”

“... scientific approval or dismissal: the irony of the human sciences is that human beings have waged war against each other in their name and that some people have been victims of those sciences. In no other area does this possibility loom larger than in studies of heredity, which have too often taken the form of studies of degeneration where the full nastiness ...”

“... years dissenters are more likely to fly the flag than besmirch it. Protesters against the war in Iraq, adopting the slogan ‘peace is patriotic,’ often carry the flag; and two years ago advocates of immigrant rights, many of them non-citizens, waved it in massive demonstrations and pledged allegiance in Spanish. Of the various iconic ...”

“... be used of the 15,000 or so Jews who attempted to remain undiscovered in Nazi Germany during the war – they called themselves ‘U-Boats’. Half of them were in Berlin, and of those only 1700 would make it to the end of the war. ‘You are going to be the only one of us to survive,’ Jalowicz’s friend Nora said as ...”