“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”