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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... the popular imagination. Fraser calls the Depression the second great national trauma (the Civil War being the first), not because of the lost fortunes and widespread misery, but because Americans indicted all the beliefs of their economic elite. The old ruling class was not just selfish but ‘foolish, frail and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... surmise. But then surmising is the bedrock of the bawdy music-hall humour that the upper-middle-class mandarins at the BBC were trying to proscribe in the 1930s, and which the popular press has always claimed as its justification – providing traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare. In late June 1963, the front ...”