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“... house was heated by coal and lit by gas, because when she and her husband came back after World War Two, the landlord told them the whole street was going to be demolished in six months and it wasn’t worth putting in electricity. And after her husband died she could never be bothered. During the war, when Mr A. was ...”

“... with cannons blazing, humiliating China and its technologically backward armies in the first Opium War. The country that Mao inherited was poor and economically devastated. Its situation compared to the major powers was arguably worse than it had been when the Europeans made their scramble for China a hundred years earlier. Mao knew this and had no intention ...”

“... that Hitler’s was Germany’s first genuine bourgeois revolution. So, perhaps it’s a matter of class?The reason, Martin-Heinz Douglas Freiherr von Bora, is that you are all that we’re striving to leave behind, the kind of Germany of lords and ladies and generals’ sons and estates … I’m not even sure you are fighting for the same Germany I’m ...”

“... some of those scarce resources which drove trade wars over the edge. Throughout the Second World War, Germany remained energy-starved. In 1943, the United States produced two-thirds of the world’s oil – to which Britain had unstinted though perilous access via the Atlantic convoys. The USSR produced another 10 per cent. By contrast, Germany controlled ...”

“... Ross McKibbin’s remarkable study of the way the cultures of class shaped English society has, at a stroke, changed the historiographical landscape. One learns more about almost any aspect of English society by reading this book than one would by reading, for example, A.J.P. Taylor’s English History 1914-45 – which makes it indispensable for anyone studying the politics, sociology or history of English society ...”

“... which few in affluent countries can claim innocence: The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war the brooks gave no information if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river it was not taking sides Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), in which those lines appear, also contained the best of her verse talismans on the theme ‘everything is ...”

“... of real unification. This November was different. There was still plenty to worry about – the war in Afghanistan dragged hopelessly on; the world’s financial economy was in ruins – but the Germans seemed not to mind. In Berlin this time, few people talked about betrayed hopes or the failures of free-market capitalism. Instead, they simply celebrated ...”

“... The school was a direct response to the Commune, to France’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, and to a sense that its ruling class was bereft of talent, industry and imagination, its imperial and cultural mission a shambles. The university now known as Sciences Po was established as a new ‘crossroads of the ...”

“... against the background of the betrayals, suspicions and hatreds of more than a generation of civil war. It is not, of course, the only mass party of the Left in trouble. The German Social Democrats – only a few years ago, one of the most competent and cohesive governing parties in the Western world – are also going through lean times. So are the American ...”

“... at night. In the ranks of supporters were hardened veterans of the battle against the Vietnam War, especially of the famous blockades of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to ...”

“... might do without having to face one. Baldwin, facing one in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, saw his task as being ‘to try and educate a new democracy in a new world and to try and make them realise their responsibilities in their possession of power, and to keep the eternal verities before them’. Their primary ...”

“... The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by Bob because of the way they ride. Poaching started, Bob explains, when some people began to believe they owned all the land and others had no ...”

“... they are acts of ‘making’. When we do these things to each other, in torturing or in waging war, however, they are ‘deconstructive’. If it were not for the 32 pages on torture which it contains, this book might not be worth reviewing, but although Scarry’s intentions are palpably decent, her account is so wholly devoid of historical evidence and ...”

“... The Great War of 1914-1918 is at last a respectable field of study for British professional historians. There has been no lack of monographs on specialised aspects of that gigantic tragedy: what have been lacking are serious synoptic studies. The highly emotional arguments over the tactics and strategy of the Western Front, initiated during the war itself by the conflicts of ‘Easterners’ versus ‘Westerners’, and continued thereafter in the battles of the memoirs, were renewed after the Second World War by the defenders and detractors of Douglas Haig: arguments which for fifty years produced a great deal more heat than light ...”

“... Black/White and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife, Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right, class v. class as bitter as before, the unending violence of US and THEM, personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM, Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind, East/West, male/female, and the ground these Fixtures are ...”