“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... These elements include the dialectical method, the theory of exploitation, a theory relating class interest to state policy, and what one may refer to as a theory of endogenous belief formation. These do not form a fully coherent theory, but a loosely integrated whole, with much scope for further development. Marx’s methodological views form a confused ...”

“... bread was, of course, Victorian liberalism’s rallying cry, the slogan under which new working-class voters were taught the gospel of free trade. Workers had good reason to care about prices, because bread provided around half the calories in working-class diets. Nothing was more essential to family life. Most of it, by ...”

“... system, which benefited a few for so long’, implicating the country’s entire political class and every government it has had since the 1990s. Not so long ago, Lebanon’s banking sector was praised for performing an ‘economic miracle’. In 2009, Riad Salamé, governor of the Banque du Liban, was voted central banker of the year. Against the ...”

“... to patients before the discovery and development of the main anti-tuberculosis drugs after World War Two – streptomycin, rifampicin and isoniazid – was, on balance, harmful. The best that sanatoria such as Nordrach in the Black Forest and its British imitators, Nordrach-on-Mendip in Somerset and Nordrach-on-Dee in Aberdeenshire, did was to prevent their ...”

“... As in Germany, Italy and France, the crisis began to make itself felt before the First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be satisfied within the terms of the old, 19th-century polity. In contrast to those of ...”

“... of my own experience; I was thus inoculated against the conventional economic wisdom of post-war Britain.’ There is little reason to doubt this, or a related comment on Keynesianism; ‘Before I ever read a page of Milton Friedman or Alan Walters, I just knew that these assertions could not be true.’ She readily makes the link from economics to ...”

“... graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common. No, what’s odd about ...”

“... slim volume was a light-hearted check-list of the attributes of the North American upper middle class, so light-hearted it gave the impression it did not have a heart at all. The entire tone was most carefully judged: a mixture of contempt for and condescension towards the objects of its scrutiny, a tone which contrived to reassure the socially aspiring ...”