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“... incident; polls put the imperial family’s popularity at its highest level since the Second World War. Credit for this belongs to Japan’s 125th emperor, Akihito, who abdicated last April after thirty years on the throne.During the postwar part of the Showa era, as Hirohito’s reign is known in Japan, the emperor was a politically divisive figure, reviled ...”

“... because those ‘falsities’ deprive Americans of any ‘legitimate language for talking about class’ and thus make it ‘all but impossible’ to ‘talk about class inequality’. What makes this second argument controversial is that ‘attacks on the use of race as a concept’ appear to anti-racist writers like ...”

“... and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with plays by John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, these books inspired a New Wave British cinema which during the early 1960s ...”

“... African town of Mafeking, where British troops were besieged for seven months in the Second Boer War: ‘all hemmed in with no road out and a bad road to get in’.After the First World War, a Durham council report on Ludworth’s pit cottages remarked that it was ‘painful to look upon these houses as the general outlook ...”

“... women and children) better. Yet Castle rests in public memory (if at all) as a class warrior, the abrasive, too stylish Red Queen, while the personable, sartorially challenged Williams is thought of as reasonable, classless and comfortably middle of the road. This, again, isn’t quite right. Williams isn’t a liberal or a centrist but a ...”

“... Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south. When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense ...”

“... about the subjects that interested him – the conflict of civilisations, the march of barbarism, class, aesthetics, Roman Catholicism – still possess bite and pertinence. His despair at the condition of 20th-century man, much ridiculed at the time, now seems merely prescient. But he did not arrive at these beliefs by contemplation. Pious he may have ...”

“... comes to history. The issues on which pro-Brexit Conservatives seem most keen to fight a culture war are those that have to do with violence, masculinity and war: whether or not to prosecute British soldiers for past crimes, what to teach schoolchildren about the British Empire, how to commemorate the ...”

“... of abstract constitutional theories on American or French lines, which had led to civil war and revolution. Instead Bagehot showed the practical benefits of the apparently illogical mix of crown, cabinet and parliamentary authority. In 1860 he described Parliament as ‘the most efficient instrument for expressing the practical opinion of cultivated ...”

“... regional power bases, which the early modern tsars were trying to turn into a reliable service class. An elaborate ‘place’ system (mestnichestvo) determined a boyar’s exact rank for honorific and ceremonial purposes. Patron-client relationships were crucial in politics and every other aspect of life. Collective responsibility – on the part of a ...”

“... has happened to ‘making’, though, since E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s title tells us that his subject is a discrete historical process, class-making. In the book, he’ll specify the large forces at work in that making – ...”

“... the origins in the complacencies engendered, and the conservatism confirmed, in the Second World War: the war’s effect, in Angus Calder’s ringing words, ‘was not to sweep society on to a new course, but to hasten its progress along the old grooves’. Some have placed them as late as the conservative reaction against ...”

“... released under the thirty-year rule. Whitehall, as we know from the history of the Second World War, has never had much faith in ordinary people. The idea that the public is a backward tribe in need of ‘re-education’ is a trifle patronising. But most of us would agree that a government trying to ‘take Britain into Europe’ had a public relations ...”

“... wars with England between the end of the 13th century and the 1540s. As an example of the waste of war, it seemed to retain its relevance for later generations. Like many other Scottish battles, it has its own song (written much later): The Flooers of the Forest, that focht aye the foremost The prime o our land, lie cauld in the clay. Historians have sometimes ...”

“... We shall know more about the origins of the English Civil War when we know more about English Puritans. This seems, on the face of it, an absurd proposition. From S.R. Gardiner’s confident description of the Great Rebellion as ‘the Puritan Revolution’ downwards, we have not lacked studies which linked Protestant religious attitudes to the coming of the Civil War ...”