“... school isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps ...”

“... her father, a conservative member of the Duma, could be said of all the ‘decent’ people of her class: ‘he never rid himself of a certain scepticism, an unwillingness to fight for an issue if he wasn’t absolutely certain that his viewpoint would prevail. The fact is, he wasn’t a fighter.’ In the sudden, peaceful disintegration of the regime in ...”

“... top of the building, in the room where Ken Currie’s controversial Rivera-style murals of working-class history can be seen around the ceiling: but the speeches were made in the Winter Garden downstairs, where heavy rain dripping through the glass roof and a chill which gnawed one’s bowels did not dismay the two hundred people who had gathered to honour the ...”

“... grown up in Missouri and attended the state university, then gone on to a clerical job during the war. He married Helen Robson, borrowed some money from her lawyer-banker father, then opened his Ben Franklin ‘variety store’. The life-changing pair of panties appeared in a list of goods sold by a garment-industry middleman in New York. The pants were ...”

“... sympathy that social harmony required. They would display the impartiality that transcends class and sectarian interest. ‘The ideal of a Liberal party,’ said Robert Lowe in 1877, ‘consists in a view of things undisturbed and undistorted by the promptings of interest or prejudice, in a complete independence of all ...”

“... before advancing towards socialism. This emphasis on the simultaneity of the national and the class struggle avoids the strategic question of alliances and priorities. If national liberation is accorded priority, then alliances between democratic forces and the anti-Apartheid capitalists become feasible and even promising. If, on the other hand, ...”

“... Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was ...”

“... the way history touched on our small town. Yet we were surrounded by it: during the Second World War our grandparents’ house had been taken over by German officers, and they were sent away to work as agricultural labourers. They were lucky: our great-grandfather was killed in a German bombing raid in 1940, while the father of my cousin Guy was executed by ...”

“... expanded and every trifling incident magnified, until dear good Austen begins to rank as a first-class bore – he is so insistent as to be a positive fatigue.’ This tart commentary was provided by David Alexander Edward Lindsay, better-known (after he succeeded his father in 1913) as the 27th Earl of Crawford, and probably best-known as the tenth Earl of ...”

“... the Napoleonic romance lay in its transformation of old snobberies into new and dynamic forms of class behaviour and class vitality. Stendhal’s hero, Fabrizio del Dongo, comes of an ancient and grand Piedmontese family, and is himself ecstatically converted to the values and promises of the new order, while at the same ...”

“... puzzle’. He continued to defend the controversial thesis of The Origins of the Second World War, and to be hurt and irritated by those who imagined that this book was an apology for Hitler. But the letters suggest that he viewed The Origins as increasingly unimportant, as the cutting edge of new historical research shifted away from the Anglo-German ...”

“... of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Trump had fun outing the AIPAC purchasers of the US political class. ‘Isn’t that right, Miriam?’ he shouted over to the widow of the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson.Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office … I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else … Look at her, sitting ...”

“... genius, one third blackguard and one third lunatic’), into documentation from the Spanish Civil War, and into the partly unsorted mountain of Koestler papers at Edinburgh University, which holds his correspondence with hundreds of often famous friends and antagonists throughout the world. Scammell seems to have interviewed almost every surviving human being ...”

“... the abolition of the Caliphate following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. A degree of order was effectively restored to it by intelligent nationalist movements which, once in power, promoted a ‘national Islam’, the better to subject religion to raison d’état and curb its more dangerous and sectarian enthusiasms. During the ...”

“... field kitchens with fires burning and army cooks stirring the regimental stew. They don’t wage war like that any more. Indeed the big wars are rarely now between neighbours: one state will cross a continent or an ocean to attack or invade, or occasionally to defend, another. The choreographed exchange of diplomatic threats, the ultimatum, the formal ...”