“... 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 Hereditary aristocrat though he was, he preached the breakdown of ‘our outdated class system’, which, he felt, did not do enough for the education of ‘poor people’s children’.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class’. The image she uses is that of the fish in the stream ‘deflected, held in place’. The fish cannot see the whole stream: nor, she suggests, can she. But she can describe the experience of being the fish in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a small ex-Biafran town in 1977, ten years after the military coup that precipitated the civil war. Her first book’s first sentence made plain the company she meant to keep, with its bold reference to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: ‘Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal ...”

“... success has been brought about, above all, by the failure of the Left. During the post-war decades ‘the British model’ was a reformist model. Under Attlee’s leadership, the Left carried out a series of changes which enabled the country to adapt to altered conditions in the world – Britain’s loss of her position as the principal ...”

“... a clue to the elusive pattern of his motives, he was asked to say with whom in the English Civil War he could identify himself. Would a lover of liberty, women, wine and hard news have been a Cavalier or a Roundhead? I remember the occasion. The answer was as inconclusive as perhaps the question was misconceived. Nevertheless, the episode made me turn later ...”

“... of the men already (and they were all men). Although the army was gearing up for the First Gulf War – Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait that August – the brigadiers made time to see him. West Germany was a necessary part of the tour since much of the British army was still based there, to deter Soviet aggression.Under Sale’s instruction, the brigadiers ...”

“... advocate of natural rights; in fact, humans confronted animals in a constant ‘state of war’. Taken to the extreme, that point of view led to the most callous cruelty, though most people had no need of Cartesian theory to feel easy about beating dogs, whipping oxen or torching cats. But the ‘beast-machine’ theory also prompted a wave of ...”