“... house nearby and helped look after him as he grew old. The poet’s heroic period was in the Civil War, when he acted as welfare officer to the Union wounded, bringing them fruit and candy as Hemingway was to do to the Italian Army in 1916. Unlike Hemingway, he made no personal heroic myth out of it, though what he saw and helped do was probably more terrible ...”

“... heavy metal band Scorpions released ‘Wind of Change’, a song celebrating the end of the Cold War: ‘The future’s in the air/Can feel it everywhere.’ It also contained the hopeful lines: ‘Let your balalaika sing/What my guitar wants to say.’ It turns out, though, that they had it the wrong way round: it is Putin who calls the tune to which ...”

“... added a lack of martial spirit to the bill. For V.H. Galbraith, Richard was a ‘misfit in his own class’ with ‘nice personal habits’, a ‘non-co-operator, who hates rugger and cricket and refuses to shout on the touchline’. (Galbraith revealed something of his own background here: a public school boy, he had shown ‘impetuous courage’ in the First ...”

“... ways of thinking and behaving that have almost entirely disappeared, along with the social class that bred them in a certain city at a certain time. While the forces that shaped Johnson still flourish all around (and particularly above) us – floreat Etona and no mistake – the society in which Livingstone was reared is now dust and ashes. Almost ...”

“... the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned into a flood with the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War that followed. The Jewish population of Moscow, Russia’s new capital, grew by a factor of almost ten between 1912 and 1926, and continued to grow until by 1939 it had reached 250,000, making Jews the second largest ethnic group in the city. More than a ...”

“... sensible administration of business begin. The third is the dream of the politician who transcends class identity, moving away from defining origins not just to enjoy wider worlds but to take the wider view. This is also a dream about enlightenment, figured as the logic of a life story. Its hidden premise is the thought that those who most completely ...”

“... outright inconsistency. Consider all the classes that are not members of themselves, such as the class of dogs, which is not itself a dog, and try to combine them into a big class of their own, the class of classes that are not self-members: then you have the result that this ...”

“... a socialist, held out the hope of collective action against racism and inequality. Ellison, a Cold War liberal, wrote scathingly about white benefactors in Invisible Man but believed in the promise of a racially inclusive American democracy. Baldwin, the gay stepson of a preacher, dreamed that romantic love between a white man and a black man might give birth ...”

“... well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and pastimes has a certain period interest. This is the beginning of the end of that culture mourned by Jeremy Seabrook among others:                                       A landlord stares.All he has ...”

“... in Barbados. His father, Isaac Hunt, trained as a lawyer in Philadelphia, and when the American War of Independence broke out, he wrote a series of pamphlets on the loyalist side. Threatened with political persecution, he fled to England in 1776, where he was soon joined by his young wife and family. In London he followed an unsuccessful career as a ...”

“... anyone? But assumptions of possession and dispossession are everywhere, and full of intimations of class and power. ‘This language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine,’ Stephen Dedalus thinks while talking to an English priest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The language isn’t the priest’s and isn’t Stephen’s, but the priest ...”

“... the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis ...”

“... only minor alterations, this could be the portrait of a nation sliding towards defeat in a major war: relentless time pressure; limited resources rapidly running down; over-confident technocrats; promises of wonder weapons; pro and anti-war factions at loggerheads; desperate young people calling for a halt to the ...”

“... Hawthorne. His contentions are that in the North-Eastern United States before the Civil War ‘the reigning ideology of manhood oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies abound, alas; that the ideology took hold, less because men were afraid of women or of the feminine components in themselves – a feminist argument that has ...”

“... management in their own city. The outcome was Tory Democracy, an attempt to capture the working-class vote. By the early 1880s, Forwood, the Conservative manager, was seeking to enlist Lord Randolph Churchill as a possible leader. Waller remarks of Tory Democracy: ‘The skilled seducers of “the uneducated” were not Radicals or politically-conscious ...”