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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Biblical injunction, which Mossad adopted as its motto: ‘By way of deception, thou shalt do war.’ Israel’s Secret Wars is a long, lively and comprehensive account of Israeli intelligence. It deals in some detail with the pre-state period when Palestine was under the British mandate and covers all three branches of the Israeli intelligence ...”

“... for is a lump of Croesus bling. It is very approximately classical – the word is synonymous with class, obviously; and is just the sort of ‘feature’ that dignifies a plutocratic stratum of Home Counties gardens. The material is Portland stone which, like oil paint, is supposedly prestigious no matter how coarsely it is handled. As a piece of design it is ...”

“... of decorum. Her subjects are almost unfailingly depressing – peasant rebellion and defeat, world war, poverty, hunger, the death of children and the despair of mothers – and her way with gouge and needle relentlessly precise. ‘The passion inspired in her by her theme,’ Clement Greenberg wrote shortly after her death in 1945, ‘required a complementary ...”

“... But I think that insult is a response to a much more devastating insult. Who went to war to keep the Falklands British? Our one and only woman PM, the future Baroness Thatcher of the concrete hairdo, armoured handbag and pussy-bow. Our very own Britannia’s victory (‘Rejoice, rejoice’) is being challenged by an upstart Latin perra with loose ...”

“... The Dam Busters, shown on BBC Television one Sunday afternoon recently, must be the perfect war film for people like myself who don’t really approve of war, or of the military mystique of competitive valour and unquestioning obedience to authority, or of the exploitation of these things for purposes of entertainment, but nevertheless go weak at the knees at the image of a flak-scarred Lancaster bomber coming in to land on a dandelion-strewn airfield at dawn somewhere in East Anglia in 1943 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on the two artists, in particular their engagement with Britain’s experience of the Second World War (Yale, £50). It might be tempting to suggest that the book supplants the show, or at least substitutes for it, but of course the works themselves are indispensable, and as hard to come to terms with as ever. ‘Sleeping Shelterers: Two Women and a ...”

“... attention because he deals with the experiences of, for the most part, the British Asian working class, specifically Punjabis, and employs both standard and non-standard English to do so. He is, as one sympathetic blogger recently wrote, ‘ethnic, proud, intelligent, multicultural, sarcastic, witty and everyone’s favourite non-majority poster boy’. But ...”