“... sometimes uses modern language for what had happened to his people: ‘we had sunk into another class ... We were members of the proletariat, though at that time we had never heard the name.’ Although Ian Jack was born into the proletariat and most of his elders worked in the linen mills, he is reluctant in a very Eighties way to accept the label ...”

“... was often difficult for people to hear what they were saying.’ But the IRA’s ‘long war’ from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s was, it transpires, far from inevitable. Indeed, in Ó Dochartaigh’s dauntingly revisionist interpretation of the Troubles, the continuing conflict becomes far less easy to explain than the much desired peace that ...”

“... invest less in education, and therefore produce fewer skilled workers. Another is that the middle class spends less when its income stagnates. As a recent report by the International Labour Organisation put it, growth tends to be ‘wage-led’, not ‘profit-led’, in most major economies. Whether or not these studies prove that there is a link between ...”

“... it looks back with a fierce, despairing, nostalgia. Is there a more solipsistic cry from the post-war years – when the world has become better informed than ever about mass starvation, tyranny, injustice, plague and poverty – than Jimmy Porter’s ‘There aren’t any good, brave causes left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the ...”

“... is what seems an interesting slip early in A.S. Byatt’s new novel. It is 1895. A young working-class man, Philip Warren, has been adopted by a liberal upper-class family, the Wellwoods. At the Kentish country home of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, a glorious Midsummer Party is in preparation. Humphry is a banker (though he ...”

“... their frustrations, remained Home Rulers from the 1870s until the outbreak of the First World War; but once war began, with the struggle of 1912-14 still having produced no parliament in Dublin, other, quite different forces gained ascendancy and the demand for Home Rule was soon replaced by republican separatism. Too ...”

“... most of it comes as less than a revelation. The book is an autobiography of Seabrook’s working-class childhood in Northampton during and just after the war. He was a twin, and the two boys were brought up by their mother, surrounded by aunts. His father, a feckless, flamboyant man, took off while they were still ...”

“... population until at least the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research ...”

“... traitor who had sided with the Algerian ‘terrorists’. Unease in France with the memory of that war has bordered on denial, although recent revelations of French atrocities are forcing a re-evaluation of the country’s colonial past. Outside France, Fanon was regarded as a leading intellectual associated with the doctrine of ‘Third Worldism’, which had ...”

“... short of the ceiling.) Others were preoccupied with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to younger ...”

“... that Scotland was sociologically hostile to the right as a result of its large industrial working class, so right-wing success had to be a matter of ideology. Unionism benefited from Protestantism and imperial pride, but also from its careful articulation of Scottish identity, which has been described by Graeme Morton as ‘unionist-nationalism’. As ...”

“... of the Jewish National Fund’s land department and a formidable ethnic cleanser in the 1948 war and during the 1950s. Oscillating between the political views of his two uncles, Yizhar has produced a richly ironic yet wholly committed account of the 20th century’s most successful settler project. It is in every sense a complex account, and in some ...”

“... Last year​ – year one of the Great War centenary – David Jones’s In Parenthesis, a long prose-and-verse evocation of his first months as a soldier, got a decent outing. The poet Owen Sheers drew on the text for his play Mametz at National Theatre Wales in the summer; Faber reissued the book with T.S. Eliot’s introduction in its series Poets of the Great War; and in Poetry of the First World War (2013), Tim Kendall chose a fine sequence of extracts – sticking to the verse where he could – even though he reckoned that Jones is ‘by far the most difficult [poet] to anthologise ...”

“... Is it just a coincidence that one of this spring’s most popular films was called Civil War?My dictionary defines ‘myth’ as both a popular tradition that embodies core social values and an ‘unfounded or false’ idea. The word hints at intentional distortion of the truth. But truth is more or less beside the point in Slotkin’s discussion of ...”

“... was, whether it really existed and what the ridicule meant, as it was about the British working class and how it had been progressively disempowered and de-emancipated, first by the Conservatives, and then more decisively by New Labour. The Establishment, too, starts from a stereotype (the phrase was first used in its common modern sense by Henry Fairlie in ...”