“... York, Norwich, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool have all taken a turn. Since the First World War, Birmingham has generally been considered the UK’s second city. It became the second most populous city in England in 1911, and in Britain forty years later, overtaking Glasgow. Today, some believe the title should go to Manchester, even though ...”

“... himself as being ‘très fatiguë’ the result, he said, of a long period as a prisoner of war in Germany. He had passed the competitive examination for entrance to the Ecole in 1939, having prepared the concours in the khâgne at Lyons, where he had been the student of Jean Lacroix (who has recently retired as the philosophy correspondent of Le Monde ...”

“... removal from Nazism to England and final ascent towards Cambridge, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents – hapless English father and fragile Austrian mother, both dead by the time he was 14 – sketch one psychological background; Jewish descent on both sides in the most anti-semitic city in Europe, another. He explains the ...”

“... uninterested in all the things men like, such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.In November 1947, Channon dined with Somerset Maugham. ‘We discussed diaries and Willie Maugham volunteered that mine, if I presented them, would be the most ...”

“... generally a sympathetic biographer, suggests that the journal was ‘an expression of middle-class vanity’, the product of someone ‘with an unshakeable belief in his own historical destiny’. Cardew was by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to evaporate. His life ...”

“... conscience; they may have admitted on occasions that there were things of genuine value in working-class culture; they may even have recognised that middle-class culture had its faults and upper-class culture its failings. But the fact remains that most of them preferred the opera to the ...”

“... religion, sexual anxiety (or indeed helplessness), a heightened sensitivity to the complexities of class privilege and to the ruthless depredations of the economic system’, sensitivities he passed on to many of his characters. (Grace Melbury, in The Woodlanders, combines ‘modern nerves with primitive emotions’.)While Baudelaire’s ideal artist quickens ...”

“... that what we are struggling for? To be united, so as to be standing free.’ Led by the MPLA, the war against colonial dispossession had begun in 1961. When the Portuguese at last recognised defeat in 1975, the Salazar dictatorship and its generals having been driven to their knees by guerrilla courage and persistence, the Angolans had not become a single ...”

“... in a series of individual case-studies, are nevertheless to be understood only in terms of the class struggle within society as a whole, and can only be treated effectively by far-reaching changes which will be part of a general social revolution. Apparent items of progress – a few women attaining positions of power or influence, increases in old-age ...”

“... are in fact committed to one of these things rather than another, to peace rather than war, or to irreligion rather than religion. But if we wish to argue about which if any of these things are necessarily socialist, ‘we had better yield the floor to the only truly great performer in that field, Plato.’ This is not to say that Schumpeter did ...”

“... by all sides in Ireland. Carlton estimates that over 40 per cent of the Irish population died war-related deaths (by killing, disease, or starvation) during these dreadful years. This may be a bit high (Sir William Petty put the number at between a quarter and a third), but Carlton plausibly argues that even in England a higher percentage of the ...”

“... no successor.’ This is the verdict on his work in a school text-book, a critical study of post-war French literature, published in the 1970s. It is not for the sociologist to agree or disagree with this verdict; he has to take it for what it is, i.e. an indisputable social fact, and to endeavour to account for it, to make it intelligible. What made ...”

“... and close, thousand upon thousand, and you might expect to feel that after the first five or six war cemeteries you have seen them all. But each one is sharply different. Albert can be found in Berks Cemetery Extension, Ploegsteert. At Hermiès, among the blue Michaelmas daisies, lies a brigadier-general with the Victoria Cross who was only 25 years old when ...”

“... both books. Hampton’s is an anthology of writings, stretching from Peasants’ Revolt to Great War, designed ‘to provide material for an alternative history of England which would put the radical progressive views of the people themselves at the centre of the narrative’. Here the term ‘people’ has a broader meaning than with Harrison: most of the ...”

“... her hosts. Ian Fletcher’s introduction does wonders for it; he has a fine sense of Victorian class nuances, for the consciences of the not-so-rich, for the servant problem, so agonising when only the poor didn’t have them; but he also finds the scene in which the paying guest and her suitor set fire to the drawing-room ‘hilarious’, and here, I ...”