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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 poet’s assassination at the insurgent military’s hands in the first month of the Civil War. It is highly fitting, therefore, that Gibson should have now written the life of Lorca, as close to a definitive biography as we are likely to get. In the Anglo-Saxon world it is often thought that Lorca’s fame came posthumously, in part perhaps because of ...”

“... for whom Thompson’s scholarship – above all, his great book The Making of the English Working Class – had been an intellectual inspiration. But many were also people in some way affected by the anti-war movement and the other upheavals of the Sixties; and for them, his work was also a political inspiration. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to ...”

“... American and Russian revolutions, but which is also largely applicable to the English Civil War, for example, or the Chinese Revolution. Bashiriyeh gives one of the best brief analyses available of the crisis within the ruling classes which preceded the Iranian revolution. He shows that the late Shah’s attempts in the Seventies to be popular both with ...”

“... ruler of her own spirit.’ To be literal and anachronistic: you do not devastate a country in a war of choice, smash its generators and lines of electrical supply, and watch while its governing class is assassinated and its middle class put to flight, and the remaining beneficiaries ...”

“... periods, give or take a year or two. The Twenties were self-contained as the era between the Great War and the world slump, and the Thirties a loaded pause between one catastrophe and the next. But the Seventies had no separate identity. Recognising this, Phillip Whitehead begins his book – written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with ...”

“... Ministry to release lower figures. A friend of mine, a normally pacific man living in a middle-class Sunni district in west Baghdad, rang me. ‘I am not leaving my home,’ he said. ‘The police commandos arrested 15 people from here last night including the local baker. I am sitting here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they come for ...”

“... a writer who feels himself to be watcher and watched. His ‘normal’ people are torpid, the class manners in which they are set are decorous and assured, even when they have the English acidity. ‘A double-minded creature I was,’ cries Miss M., the genuine midget in this novel. A freak she may be, precocious in her intellect and her retorts as she ...”

“... part of American political culture from the outset. Taylor breaks decisively with a trope of Cold War propaganda which has worked its way into historical scholarship: the idea that unlike the ‘bad’ French and Russian Revolutions, which degenerated into violent class conflict, a united American people rebelled against ...”