“... 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 ...”

“... long, published by HMSO as part of the official history of the home front during the Second World War, and it addresses, with unyielding attention to detail, such topics as the exact division of administrative responsibilities for the provision of ambulance and other first-aid services during the war. Much of his later work ...”

“... of seats in each of the constituent parts of Great Britain – as it has since the Second World War. The Lib Dems won nearly a quarter of the votes (more than last time) but only 57 seats (five fewer than last time). The Labour and Conservative Parties are now in effect regional parties. Labour is the party of the inner cities (London included) and ...”

“... the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless books, articles and TV documentaries, it has also inspired novels and films, and even came up on The Sopranos, cited by Tony and Carmela Soprano to their ...”

“... Piketty dwells particularly on the intrusion of warfare: ‘To a large extent, it was the chaos of war, with its attendant economic and political shocks, that reduced inequality in the 20th century.’ His book is also something of a throwback in its mode of address. A clear and sometimes sarcastically witty writer (noting that the parents of Harvard students ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... suit and cap. Lenton was one of many suffragette fugitives who remained in hiding until the war brought them amnesty. Like their feminist forebears, suffrage historians have tended to take sides, for or against militancy. Jill Liddington’s influential first book, One Hand Tied behind Us, written with Jill Norris, and published in 1978, offered a ...”

“... By spring 1940 France and Britain had been at war with Germany for more than six months; Belgium was already occupied by the Nazis. On 9 June some fifty divisions Of the German Army under von Rundstedt, a commander so formidable that even Hitler is said to have treated him with considerable respect, struck southwards from Belgium towards Rheims ...”

“... of the mid-19th-century European imagination as are Middlemarch, L’Education Sentimentale, and War and Peace. Whatever it was that condemned Galdos to international neglect, it was certainly not insularity of outlook. For British readers the case is particularly ironic. The author of Fortunata and Jacinta modelled himself on Balzac and Scott and on his ...”

“... the usual lazy caricature of the sour-faced, high-minded left. He is easily irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts ...”

“... life – everyone watching everyone else. Gossip is saturated with disapproval, resentment, class hierarchy; everybody’s ranked according to their job, their education, which church they go to, what their family name betrays about them. Some celebrate ancestors who came over with the Pilgrims, others are Irish Catholics, or ...”

“... Last year a BBC documentary about the war in Bosnia showed the town of Travnik besieged by Bosnian Serbs. Conditions in the town were dismal; hunger and fortitude were the order of the day. The programme was watched by 1.8 million viewers, none more attentive than a Mrs Willis of Bath, who wrote to the broadcasters complaining about the amount of smoking in the programme ...”

“... and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries. One always rather likes the Nigger; evidently ...”

“... Like many other political scientists and historians, they refer back to the ‘post-war consensus’, an era in which, supposedly, Conservatives of the One Nation school were at one with Labour in upholding a social democratic settlement. This view is now vigorously disputed by critics, who claim that British politics were always polarised ...”