“... In 1776 there were fewer than half a million slaves in North America; by 1790, in spite of the war, there were 700,000. Another investigator, Larry Tise in Pro-Slavery: A History of the Defence of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, shows how deeply men’s thinking, all over the country, came to be tainted by this vicious survival. Ministers of religion, the ...”

“... memorable turn on Desert Island Discs, where he spoke of the guilt he had felt at surviving the war, read his own poetry, wept and paid tribute to his wife and daughter. He was then asked, if he had just one wish, what it would be. ‘I wish I had died in the war,’ he replied with passion – in which case, of ...”

“... hard by the populist media, it’s patronising to assume, as Makin-Waite writes, that working-class people are incapable of coming up with racist ideas of their own. But ideas gain traction when placed in a totalising framework: national-populist conspiracy theories link hostility to immigration with resentment of liberal ideas and the corporations that ...”

“... and Rana got married in the last week of October, and moved into the apartment. Thanks to the war, they decided not to have a wedding party, or even a family dinner.Wafiq was proud of his new apartment, in the village of Maaysrah, north of Beirut. For two decades, since he was sixteen, he had worked in menial jobs – in a petrol station, on construction ...”

“... to Vietnam.It’s often been said since that these young men would not have been bothered by the war if it were not for their own impending draft notices, and that they were quite prepared to let the underclass be conscripted in their stead. This is quite simply a slander. The arguments and conversations of those years disclosed a group of very serious and ...”

“... away from itself. Once the Liam Cosgrave Government came to power in 1973, the Irish middle class, new and old, had, in the cabinet, voices of reason, such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Garret FitzGerald, to lead them away from a notion of their Irish heritage as something dark, catastrophic and violent towards the bright light of European Union and ...”

“... democracy was undone by its victory in the Sixties and Seventies. As the solid blue-collar working class fragmented and an employee class emerged, the old class conflict turned into a fight for social mobility. People rejected the bureaucracy that managed the economy and the trade unions ...”

“... strange desert country named after its dynasty and ruled almost entirely by a quite numerous upper class wholly generated from the loins of its founding father, King Abdul Aziz, better known in the West as Ibn Saud. Saudi Arabia was said in the Senate to be ‘scorning basic American interests’, which meant both human rights and Israel. Americans then and ...”

“... Aslam’s fourth novel, and his most ambitious, seeks to describe both the communal nature of war – the bereavements and partings that afflict almost everyone – and the particular experiences of a few individuals in a Pakistani town called Heer. It may take a while to adjust to Aslam’s cast of characters and his premodernist fusion of the individual ...”

“... had time and means to ‘find himself’, mixing with the bright and powerful, belonging to a class which gave him some measure of sexual society that he would have been unlikely to find as the son of a labourer. Also White was fortunate to come of age during a war which did more to educate and liberate him than cause ...”

“... Though he joined in the chorus of contempt and hatred which it was fashionable for the middle-class English literati of the time to feel for their schooldays, the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years ...”

“... said something as we passed. He frowned and shook his head. He looked afraid.’ He knew his upper-class types, and his dons and schoolmasters. As the son of an archbishop he knew the clergy all too well. On Dean Farrar: ‘I have no doubt he thinks of himself as the ascetic dean, quivering with indignation at the immoralities of the age ... moving to his ...”

“... itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The scepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became ...”

“... year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values which he blamed for an agonising war. In all this, the Liberals were avenging themselves on the Right, and Strachey’s assaults probably helped to mould, and were certainly reinforced by, Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. Bertrand Russell read Eminent Victorians ...”

“... upbringing – Eton and Balliol – lightly but not altogether unselfconsciously. In World War Two a contemporary remembered Major Grimond, now a veteran of the Normandy campaign, ‘surrounded by people completely unlike himself so that he seemed a different animal, a noble beast in a farmyard’. He later corrected a television interviewer who called ...”