“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Before​ the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of his narrative, however. It’s the last section, on the international scene and the lead-up to war, that plays that role; and its importance to the overall story is flagged by his subtitle ‘Waiting for Hitler’. Stalin’s decisive victory over his political opponents came in the late 1920s. Almost immediately, to the surprise of many, he embarked on an ...”

“... him to death for crimes including ‘planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatised as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed and so on, by gas, lethal injections and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums during the Euthanasia Programme and participating in the mass murder ...”

“... as one of England’s most successful kings, and by the time his personal rule began in 1437, the war with France had turned decisively against the English, the Crown was bankrupt and the lords increasingly divided.What was needed was clear and firm management; what Henry offered was an absence of management. Biographers write of his complete lack of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and verbose writer who had been swept to a form of cultural celebrity by the vogue for working-class sentimentalism in the 1960s and lefter-than-thou self-righteousness in the 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of his death, positive assessments understandably predominated. Some moving tributes appeared as former comrades, colleagues and students tried to ...”

“... had quickly passed a new law to make things more comfortable. For nine months at the start of the war, Joyce had ‘broadcast for the enemy’, and that was enough to finish him. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that he was hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a small fine. Widespread wireless ownership led to a ...”

“... widely hailed as a future party leader.There were, of course, disappointments. Tim Ryan, a working-class populist who ran a strong campaign in red Ohio, lost by 6.6 points to the right-wing pseudo-populist J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about growing up among poor whites in Appalachia that made him a darling of liberals in New York and ...”