“... New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is illegal under international law.’ But ‘it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.’ ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is ...”

“... from Beveridge, restates the old managerialist dream: ‘The object of government in peace and war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man’ – a message that lost its shine a while ago. The book has arrived too late for Ed Miliband, whose efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were ...”

“... been substantial minorities of foreigners in several countries since long before the First World War. France, for example, has imported labour from elsewhere in Europe since the late 19th century, and by 1921 nearly 5 per cent of its population was foreign-born; even as early as 1920 more than 10 per cent of the resident population of Switzerland was ...”

“... and the secret services were to terrorise the population into acquiescence. Kulaks were an old class enemy, momentarily reprieved by the NEP. But how to make war on them now? They were the most active and often the most prominent individuals in the rural communities – and the Party and secret police were relatively few ...”

“... for the silent. In some ways, it is true, 17th-century women did have a common lot. Whatever their class, they were held to be inferior to men, intellectually, morally and spiritually. Institutions and the law, as we would say, discriminated against them. Yet in society they shared little beyond their formal disadvantages. Historical inquiry which treats ...”

“... and elegance, learned in part from Auden. Fuller was well known in the early Forties as a war poet, and there was a great demand for war poets. The experiences offered by the Navy were for the most part strictly prosaic, but some of them he turned, with ambitious care, into good poems. I have heard A Lost Season ...”

“... culture,’ Strong writes, ‘is at the heart of Peru’s post-conquest history.’ A small ruling class of European descent, established mainly on the coast, held sway over a huge territory with impressive natural resources. Until the 1970s they kept the Indians on their estates in conditions of virtual serfdom. In the early part of this century, middle-...”

“... from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes. But what really made her famous were her attacks on feminism and academia, coupled with her paeans to pop culture. Naming names and kicking butt, Paglia quickly became a media celebrity, who hit the gossip columns when the model Lauren Hutton ...”

“... wish to become a meteorologist was now overwhelmed by the urge to write poetry. In ‘To World War Two’, written half a century later, Koch recalls thinking: ‘If I’m killed while thinking of these lines, it will be too corny When it’s reported’ (I imagined that it would be reported!) So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on ...”

“... as a fable of how the militantly anti-bourgeois frequently turn out to have been solidly middle-class all along. Spiotta herself was born in 1966. She published her first novel, Lightning Field (LA, hyperconsumerism, anomic drift) in 2001, and together with her husband now owns and works in a restaurant in upstate New York. She has said that it was hearing ...”

“... Williams was, indeed, a quite compulsive writer, almost a chronic writer. As a young working-class scholarship boy up at Cambridge, he seems to have decided, like not a few Welshmen before and after him, that the way to storm this alien citadel was to overwhelm it with a tide of wordy socialism. As an undergraduate Communist, he wrote his first pamphlet ...”

“... as the political norm in Turkey. A more structural explanation is needed. During the Second World War, Inönü had steered his country in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering political affinity and passive assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be ...”

“... Harrison’s ‘barbarian’ recital of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a Northern working-class accent that he called a halt after only four words:‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death …Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of thoseShakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!’As a plebeian scholarship boy at Leeds Grammar ...”

“... idea of the Thirties, the afternoon men in their Soho clubs and hideouts, their lust for working-class boys, their not wonderfully well-informed Marxism, and their easy way of arranging matters to suit themselves, whether in the choice of wartime careers, say at Bletchley, or perhaps in some other establishment where scraps of secret could be salvaged to ...”