“... Yuri Slezkine​ , a master stylist as well as a first-class historian, is the least predictable of scholars. Still, it comes as a surprise to find that the book he has now produced, after long gestation, is a Soviet War and Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War ...”

“... shouting ‘Vive la Pologne!’ when charging with the bayonet – on the grounds that this was a war declared on behalf of Poland. The sergeant failed to convince him that he was sowing moral confusion in a rank of conscripts shouting ‘Vive la France!’, and the first of his incarcerations took place. After the Armistice, he joined the collaborationist ...”

“... in three distinct waves. The first generation came to maturity in the palmy days before the Great War, when the empires were assuming their final consolidated form, and colonialism seemed unchallengeable: in the long decade of 1872-84 were born Marcel Mauss (1872), Alfred Kroeber (1876), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881), and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884), with Ruth ...”

“... Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-...”

“... than theoretical ground. The back cover suggests that it can be read as a guide to ‘upper-class’ life. But this is misleading. As the text itself makes clear, Henry and Caroline are not, and are not about to become, either owners or controllers of any significant proportion of the means of production. Sloane Rangers are the subalterns and field ...”

“... similarities with Sons and Lovers. Both deal with the emergence of artistic talent from working-class fetters. But in the way that he has chosen to tell A Prodigal Child, Storey defies Lawrentian precedent. The novel suggests, rather, that he is aiming to synthesise his play and novel-writing practices. The marrow of the work is in its dialogue – a ...”

“... strong impression of the waste in their lives, and of the waste in the lives of Victorian middle-class women in general, that made up his earliest memories of family life. Carpenter then went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1864, straight to the heart of the Broad Church network, and eventually to a fellowship in that college, newly relinquished by Leslie ...”

“... such a threat to competition in Britain. Meanwhile Britain waives the rules. When the new Spirit class of ferries was launched by the heralds of free enterprise at Townsend Thoresen, there were new designs for the bow doors. Captains and seamen begged the company to instal some sort of warning system which might keep the bridge informed if the doors were not ...”

“... to ask John Selden’s question about the abolition of the bishops at the beginning of the Civil War: ‘when the dog is beat out of the room, where will they lay the stink?’ It is no coincidence that the Quality Assessment machinery in universities was introduced in the 1992 Act, the same Act in which the ratio of government money to numbers of students ...”

“... advantage of the stronger, dominant group in society. Consider the facts. In each city the ruling class – which could be many individuals in a democracy, a few oligarchs, or a single tyrant – has fixed the laws to serve its own interests. The rest of us, if we obey these laws as justice requires, are simply profiting the rulers. And profiting them means ...”

“... meant to this country’. He thought she would be responsible for bringing America into the war.Just a few years before, Thompson had been most famous for her marriage to Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and for what her friends referred to as her ‘comico-terrible gaffe’. In 1931, when the Nazi Party was on ...”

“... There​ can scarcely be a subject about which more books have been written than the Second World War, and yet surprisingly few of them risk a synthesis of the whole. Many writers refer to the war in their titles, but their subjects are usually only a part of the whole: a campaign, a geographical area, a single country or, very often, a single armed service ...”

“... and Pickett admit, ‘there is a strong social gradient in imprisonment, with people of lower class, income and education much more likely to be sent to prison than people higher up the social scale.’ The US imprisons great swathes of its poor, black population. It doesn’t follow from this that almost everyone is worse off than they would be under a ...”

“... is a long time ago. ‘Oligarch’ is now no more than a loose social designation, like ‘upper class’ or ‘old money’. It does not help much in locating political power, though a number of ‘oligarchs’ are active in politics. Is this not finessing? Is the country in some fundamental sense not run even now by the high bourgeoisie? The term clase ...”

“... like that of Leslie Stephen only more so, since he was rather better-off. They were upper-middle-class intellectuals, though they might not have called themselves so, and in their day that status ensured an unusual degree of both comfort and influence. From Ann Thwaite’s biography of Gosse one remembers the remarkable moment when Gosse passed a note to ...”