“... domestic violence, the petty and grand humiliations of racism, poverty, illness and genocidal war, but they don’t give up on life – it’s rather that the problems are their life, and interesting in themselves if held in the hand, as it were, at a short distance. Difficulties are to be expected, and you don’t get to choose their scale, only your ...”

“... capitalist/socialist economy. From 1921 to 1929, after winning a bitter and devastating civil war, the Bolsheviks retreated temporarily from their goals of nationalisation and collectivisation and allowed private land ownership and a free-market agriculture. In 1929 the position changed abruptly when the party leadership decided on a radically leftist ...”

“... actors to show off their wares, the Royal Court revolution was an assertion of the lower middle class, the unfashionable, the provincial and the direct, against the feyness, falsity and snobbery of a sclerotically self-regarding West End. However, as Rebellato points out, there was another fault-line dividing the West End from the Royal Court ...”

“... as personifying ‘a new sort of “young generation”, the lyric poet of the New York working class, of the strike front, the writer of sketches that bite into the memory’. Born in London in 1911 to a Jewish family that emigrated to the US when he was three, Hayes left school in 1929, the year of the Crash. His father, a barber and a bookmaker, wanted ...”

“... This feeling expressed hatred accumulated over the centuries, the bitterness of three years of war, and the hysteria generated by the revolutionary leaders.’ Lenin’s slogan ‘Loot the looters!’ encouraged but did not create this hatred and envy. The poor derived their own satisfaction from the process of destroying and despoiling the ...”

“... For him, Clemenceau was ‘the man who led them’ – the ordinary soldiers of the First World War – ‘and their allies’ (who does Dallas have in mind?) ‘to victory in 1918. And a victory it certainly was.’ No it wasn’t: 1914-18 was a disaster all around, and so was Clemenceau’s handiwork – the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The break-up of the ...”

“... b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They also had parallel lives as spies, soldiers, shaggers and men of action (or in Connolly’s case, of inaction so spectacular that ...”

“... moment for the European left, though not an uncontroversial one. Marx praised it in The Civil War in France (1871) – ‘Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class’ – but in 1872 in a new preface to The Communist Manifesto he wrote: ‘The working ...”

“... religious toleration, and an end to dynastic conflict. Fortunate, too, in that its dominant landed class was open to new ideas and new recruits, and understood how to concede its power gracefully and in time. And fortunate, finally, because its pioneering Industrial Revolution had furthered the already substantial prosperity and social mobility of its ...”

“... anyone who has ever been a foreign correspondent will admit that Waugh’s dreadful pack of war reporters is all too realistic. Indeed, the book has given journalists a phrase which they have adopted as their own. ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ we say to each other whenever one of our number is getting the wrong end of the journalistic stick. Not ...”

“... their actions with nobility. Between the two, and able to meld with either, there is ‘Holy War’ to propagate or defend a religious or political creed. But ‘Major Bert Price’s’ voice, as tape-recorded and edited by Parker, evokes none of these three traditions. This voice has told us that ‘Price’ joined the Army as a regular while on ...”

“... opened up by the numerous free trade treaties of the first half of the decade. The Franco-Prussian War also helped; then he withdrew, just before a bad depression hit the metallurgical trades in the mid-1870s. A third key was a hunger for expansion, and the vision and marketing skill necessary to feed it. He forced out rivals and created a virtual monopoly by ...”

“... with other left-wing and nationalist groupings. Most democrats and many of the new business class believe that will be bad; some think it will be very bad; a few think it could be murderous.There is serious talk of expropriations, imprisonments, political assassinations and civil war. The belief that the changes of ...”

“... England since the Imagists’. He believes that a lot of good poems (‘key texts’) in the post-war period originated in the play of influence between members of the group, and by extending the term to include writers who weren’t among the New Lines poets, but nevertheless felt some sympathy with them, he makes a fair case. Whether he’s right to ...”

“... Irish massacred at Drogheda or Wexford somehow shared Cromwell’s definition of the ‘rules of war’, and that James II lacked legitimacy because he was no longer legal King of England. He was surely a king to the Irish who fought at the Boyne, and for that reason a threat, not only to the religious unity of the Williamite settlement, but to its whole ...”