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“... in the planning of the lunches and dinners presented to her guests. In those days every middle-class household expected to employ at least two or three domestic servants; and the Webbs were not short of money. In the diary there are occasional references to secretaries and research workers, and one or two ‘maids’ are also incidentally mentioned by ...”

“... determining factor there was Bevan’s recognition that the new system would never work unless the class enemy, the BMA, could be persuaded to buy into it: not such a romantic story. The key to understanding Lloyd George is knowing that he was a spoiled child, adored by his family, whence both his extreme egoism and his celebrated charm. It was by a stroke of ...”

“... wars with very large numbers of fatalities. But they inspire much less interest than Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine or Israel’s attack on Gaza. The war in Syria received years of diligent consideration, if only because the principal crimes were carried out by designated enemies of the US and UK. On the few ...”

“... overlords that broke out in 1916, and which was a significant help to the Entente powers in their war against the Turks’ ally, Germany. But helping the Allies hadn’t been his main aim. What he had wanted was for the Arabs to take the opportunity of the war to seize power for themselves, in a great pan-Arab federation if ...”

“... every morning and evening. Kobe’s death and destruction were concentrated in the solidly working-class ward of Nagata, a centre of Japanese shoe production. Before it was levelled, Nagata was home to about half of Kobe’s 20,000 Korean residents, as well as Japan’s largest ghetto of burakumin. The word means ‘hamlet people’ though its mere mention ...”

“... Before​ the First World War, the European high aristocracy roamed freely across the continent, taking the waters at Baden-Baden, sampling the sea air at Biarritz, shooting partridge and pheasant at Sandringham, and coming together for grand balls and funerals in virtually every European capital. With so many occasions on which to meet, and so much disdain for those who married below their station, it was hardly surprising that the rate of intermarriage between Europe’s leading families was so high ...”

“... with Bert Harrop was not an aberration: it is clear from Eden’s diaries that he liked working-class people. Hereditary aristocrat though he was, he preached the breakdown of ‘our outdated class system’, which, he felt, did not do enough for the education of ‘poor people’s children’. After his resignation in ...”

“... redemption, it was this weird experience, typical of the Dostoevsky-dominated decade of the Great War, which brought him into contact with revolutionary politics. As to the disastrous affair itself, Lukács was rescued from it in 1917 by Gertrud Bortstieber, the daughter of a rabbi from the Slovak region of Hungary, a Catholic convert. ‘Ever since I met ...”

“... of ‘having fun’ still existed within the constricting but benevolent circumscription of middle-class values. If you moved down Peddar Road or Breach Candy towards Haji Ali, you would pass the Willingdon Club and the Race Course on your right, almost the last full-blooded colonial outpost, and then gradually approach parts of the city that were glamorous ...”

“... had the chance to write history, it would be the history of those popular layers.’* After the war, Lewin spent a few years in Poland and France before moving in 1951 to Israel, where he worked on a kibbutz and as a journalist for ten years, received a BA from Tel Aviv University, and made his first serious study of Marxism. However, as an old-fashioned ...”

“... Both The Pity of War and the reception it has enjoyed illustrate aspects of British culture about which one can only feel ambivalent. Anyone who has been a victim, let alone a perpetrator, of the Oxbridge system will recognise Niall Ferguson’s book for what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against whatever he sees as the conventional wisdom – or, worse still, the fashion – of the time ...”

“... self-derogatory humour, but I have the feeling that the seriousness of purpose which pervaded post-war Eton has given way to a ‘being with-it’ on the part of both boys and ‘beaks’ – known to the rest of Britain as teachers or school-masters. This, for example, is how Dixon recalls his lessons – or ‘divs’: My memories of Latin are a ...”

“... critique in his remarkable self-portrait Pack My Bag, written in 1938-9 under the threat of war and now reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack My Bag is a little rushed, but it wonderfully evokes the euphoria of licensed idleness in beautiful ...”

“... best-known lesbian novel in the English language. At heart, The Well is a nice long solid Great-War-period romantic novel. The ethos is that of If winter comes, or The Forsyte Saga. Stephen, the hero/heroine, driven out of her grand ancestral home, joins an ambulance unit, is wounded and gets the Croix de Guerre, and won’t declare her compromising love ...”

“... regardless of which party was in office. Its membership is drawn broadly from the progressive class and the Report, though acknowledging the Commission’s general ideological alignment with ‘the Opposition’, conspicuously denies any particular attachment to the Labour Party. In fact, the Commissioners look remarkably like the Gaitskellite Labour ...”