“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Asia smouldered – in India there was Partition, in Malaya the Emergency, in Burma the civil war – Ceylon became Whitehall’s model for the transfer of colonial power. ‘There was no fight for that freedom which involved a fight for principles, policies and programmes,’ Solomon Ridgeway Bandaranaike, the anti-colonial head of state who took power ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... known as the External Names, about thirty thousand families of the English and Scots high middle class. These men and women, presented with losses on underwriting for the years 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991 many times greater than their investment and even their net worth, have responded in unusual fashion. They have rebelled and many seem bent, Samson-like, on ...”

“... admission (you can do another language, but hardly anyone does). The Olympic Mathematics Class is popular with primary school pupils who show an early interest in the sciences. In a big city like Shanghai or Beijing, one-to-one maths tutoring for young children can cost 500 RMB per hour (the average wage in big cities is around 50 RMB per hour). As ...”

“... on the day that Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Next he is a partisan in the Spanish Civil War. He is present in Moscow in 1957, ‘shocked’ to see that the embalmed Stalin was ‘so tiny and yet so all-powerful’. He is part of ‘the attentive and unquestioning multitudes’ who listen to Fidel Castro for hours on end. He is a deathbed witness to ...”

“... young man. On his release in 1927 he joined the French Foreign Legion, and during the Second World War is said to have expiated his crime by saving Jews in Marseille from deportation to Auschwitz. Police inquiries soon established that the three young men were part of a much wider conspiracy involving others as young as 16. All of them were from good ...”

“... in a fictional (and when Coward wrote it in 1947, immediate) past in which Britain had lost the war and been occupied by the Nazis. Here, the group affected is not a family but the regulars of a London pub, and as the play covers only five years the gaps are shorter. But the fundamental dramaturgical challenges remain the same, and, surprisingly for someone ...”