“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were the adjectives used by Engels to describe English socialists in his Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. By ‘English socialists’ Engels meant, not the wide range of heterogeneous sects whom the term would have embraced at any later period, but one specific group – the followers of Robert Owen. Like Engels himself, Robert Owen was an ...”

“... paramilitary left grouping whose graduates came to public attention during the early months of the war against terror. The Weather Underground, a much more serious organisation, was an offshoot of the anti-war movement Students for a Democratic Society, and carried out a series of bombings on government targets in the early ...”

“... an aristocrat from a famous Prussian military family, was executed shortly before the end of the war (his wife believes he survived as long as he did on the strength of his illustrious name). The von Moltkes founded what the Nazis called the Kreisauer Kreis or Kreisau Circle (she says it’s an excellent name), a talking-shop of patrician resisters who were ...”

“... and business men, but later came to be drawn primarily from the white-collar and lower middle class. The Brigade gave them an unrivalled opportunity for inculcating their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner lounging. In addition to the ...”

“... desire for indoor toilets, Britain built more ‘new towns’ in the thirty years after the war than any other country outside the Soviet Union. By the end of the 20th century these new towns, constructed mostly on greenfield sites, facilitated by a series of parliamentary acts and managed by development corporations, were home to some 2.5 million ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... among the livid faces of the dead.’ Rivers’s attempts to help his patients deal with war neurosis are essentially humane and uncoercive, and as such contrast with those of Dr Yealland, another historical figure working in the same field. The episode where Rivers watches his colleague torture a dumb soldier back to speech by giving him repeated ...”

“... by the French army in the Low Countries in 1794, and Napoleon – alert to the potential of air war – set up a Compagnie d’Aérostiers. During the invasion panic of 1803, Uglow notes, a new play, Goody Two Shoes; or Harlequin Alabaster, was performed at Sadler’s Wells; in it a French invasion by balloon is foiled at a lighthouse, in the process ...”

“... encounter which brings to mind the rescue of Enigma code books from a German submarine in the last war. A privateer captain, Bartholemew Sharpe, caught the captain of a Spanish ship, the Santa Rosario, in the act of jettisoning them. Geographical information was sensitive. The Spaniards did not allow printed charts of the Pacific coast to be made and ...”

“... According to those who employ this smooth and evasive construction, the lesson of the Vietnam War is that the United States suffered greatly from being ‘entangled’ in a ‘quagmire’ in Indo-China, and should henceforth be extremely prudent about overseas military commitments. Jimmy Carter put it very gruffly, when he said that both America and ...”

“... mistakes, so sooner or later the letters all got lost in a grey blur. Not many in the babies’ class learned to read or write by this method. That didn’t matter too much, though. Hanmer Church of England School was less concerned with teaching its pupils reading, writing or arithmetic, than with obedience and knowing things by heart. Soon you’d be able ...”

“... quality which might be described as a trapped and backward-looking anger: the Protestant working class is unique in Europe, ‘in that it is the only working class not to have been radicalised by World War One.’ When UVF terrorists were imprisoned in Long Kesh they named their huts ...”