“... Villalobos had addressed a similarly ecstatic crowd in San Salvador’s central plaza. The war was over; the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, had forced the government to negotiate a settlement. The victory was far from complete. The right was still in power, 70,000 people had died and economic reform hadn’t been mentioned in the ...”

“... man, ex-priest and Irish patriot Gerald O’Donovan, which lasted from the end of the First War (when Macaulay was 37) until O’Donovan’s death in 1942. The ‘affair’ was secret, cerebral and possibly celibate: no letters survive, and Macaulay did not keep a diary. On the available evidence, ‘passionate’ may be a misleading word to ...”

“... takes J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England as the culmination of the debate. Mill brought his own ambivalence to bear upon the tradition of the classical economists, acknowledging the adverse impact of machinery upon the working class, at least during a ...”

“... as America’s adversaries build up their military power to levels not seen since the Second World War. She noted the intensifying threat of China upending the existing international order, and America’s continued support for Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression and for Israel in its fight against Hamas. ‘This arsenal of democracy helped ...”

“... there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not very photogenic class’; in Cambridge, among those who sat at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso ...”

“... A really nasty, dirty little war … Waste of time, money and everything else’ was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age. He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were ‘uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity ...”

“... Alan Ryan’s search for consistency between Bertrand Russell’s reactions to the First World War and his reactions to the Vietnam War seems to me entirely admirable and in the middle of the bat, but he and I must both allow for the fact that a book written, for example, by Lord Fenner-Brockway might have found a ...”

“... For generations, the American Civil War has been shrouded in clouds of millennial nationalism. Few events in US history have been as susceptible to providentialist narratives of inevitable moral triumph: stories of an exceptional nation reborn into its modern form, cleansed of its original sin of slavery and ready to shoulder its redemptive responsibilities in the drama of world history ...”

“... a good cause (when he did just that, from a trench on the Aragón front during the Spanish Civil War, someone put a bullet through it). Like it or not, ‘Orwell’ is a brand: ordinariness, common decency, speaking plain truths to power, a haggard, prophetic gaze. It is surely some or all of those qualities, rather than any particular political ...”

“... bordering on panic, that goes beyond economics. An idea of home that is dear to the English middle class is, it seems, under threat. Hermann Muthesius, whose Das englische Haus first appeared just over a century ago and has now been translated in full for the first time, would have sympathised. For him too the English way of domestic life was a precious ...”

“... caught random but symbolic moments and exude the atmosphere of Galsworthy’s comfortable middle-class background: the large houses with mahogany furniture and deep carpets and silent servants; the heavy meals starting with brown Windsor soup and ending with Cabinet pudding; broadcloth and tweed, shooting and croquet and tennis, and holidays in huge hotels ...”

“... The British Empire attained its maximum extent just after the First World War, but the peak of imperial visibility and imperialist sentiment at home was arguably reached two or three decades earlier, most colourfully in the great imperial pageant that marked the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had been a Winchester schoolboy at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A ...”

“... only whites he wanted to provoke with Native Son, but members of the decorous black middle class, who felt that a figure like Bigger Thomas was a threat to their precarious status on the margins of white America.Native Son was a work of shocking intransigence in its portrayal of black rage, in its treatment of liberal whites and, above all, in its ...”

“... attempts, by oblique routes, to explain major events in English history: in one case the Civil War, and in the other the Reformation. That, however, is where the resemblance between them ends: for the rest, it would be hard to find a more extreme contrast in historical methods. Professor Underdown, as he makes clear in his preface, sees no virtue in ...”

“... the faulted relationship between the brothers provides an even better fix on the rumbles of war, Communism, Fascism and exile. Heinrich was born in 1871, Thomas four years later. They were the oldest of five children in a Lübeck patrician family. Both of their sisters, the bohemian Carla and neither Heinrich nor Thomas was ever close to their much ...”