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“... crushed the peasants led by Müntzer in one of the last battles of the German Peasants’ War. Müntzer was captured, tortured – confessing his heretical belief that ‘omnia sunt communia,’ ‘everything belongs to everybody’ – and beheaded. Our man narrowly escapes, and in the woods outside Frankenhausen sheds his first blood, killing three ...”

“... from socialist revolution. Severe stresses and tensions remained, but the clear trend before the war was towards co-operation and integration.’ This had been made possible by reforms going back to the 1860s. After the serfs were emancipated in 1861, the government set up zemstvos, elective local government assemblies; it created independent law courts; it ...”

“... Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to thrive. By contrast their antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less well. This ...”

“... to acknowledge that he had been elected to implement a socialist programme. In our own era of post-class politics, this may sound grandiloquent and out of place, but at the time it seemed natural. Many books have been written in French about Mitterrand, but only half a dozen in English; this impressive biography by Philip Short, a BBC correspondent in Paris in ...”

“... on to power than the Liberal-Country Party coalition found it after 1949. Australia ended World War Two with a Labor government, but there was no post-war urge in Australia, as there was in Britain, to create an all-embracing welfare state – partly because its welfare policies were already well advanced. The ...”

“... Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social and political impact than C. Vann Woodward, whose books and essays concerned the nation’s most enduring problem, racial ...”

“... and bilateral) over the late colonial period in Algeria and France’s undeclared war against the independence movement.Most of Macron’s interventions concede a point of principle in parts of the world where, in practice, France has single-mindedly pursued its economic interests. But Israel is a separate matter, despite its resemblance to ...”

“... account for it with the distanced insight that deprivation begets violence, for this was a middle-class crime. Middle-class crime permits middle-class identification, and along with it the frisson of broken taboo and threatened class identity. This ...”

“... Tory councillor, a Poor Law guardian and on school boards; and was charged during the First World War with evacuating the Blackwater Estuary in the event of a German invasion. But dogs were his real passion.Renowned as a breeder of greyhounds, Salter competed at field trials and was a judge at dog shows both nationally and internationally. In Russia he became ...”

“... rehearse the privileges of working for superior families before 1914; ‘surplus’ women with war experience live together in practical and possibly more intimate arrangements; middle-aged village stalwarts organise bring-and-buy sales and fundraisers for the Conservatives, haggle over the flower-arranging in church and fuss over the curates.Not all are ...”

“... singles out ‘Leavisites’ as the chief culprits. Leavis himself could certainly be a world-class sniper and caviller, but when, having read this biography, I returned to some of his celebrated pronunciamentos about Spender, it was impossible not to recognise, amid a good deal of exaggeration and unfairness, the aptness of some of his main ...”

“... died. Schwieger’s unexpected success electrified the world, despite the fact that the European war had already been raging for nine months. Shock and horror swept through Allied and neutral nations alike. In New York City, the composer Charles Ives observed that passengers waiting for the ‘El’ train spontaneously began to sing the Gospel song ‘In the ...”

“... sitting amiably in front of shelves of books, rumpled and smoking a pipe. Many Japanese of the war generation would have no trouble understanding the reasons for the fanfare. Kiyosawa, a journalist, was consistent in his criticism of Japan’s military Government throughout the Second World War, and never succumbed to ...”

“... with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus were of very wide interest. The Bolsheviks could well be said to have brought off a miracle. In the First World ...”

“... Mall Gazette, could pay six shillings to entrepreneurial jailers for a private cell and a ‘first-class’ stay. (‘Never had I a pleasanter holiday, a more charming season of repose,’ Stead wrote of his incarceration in 1885, after he had ‘purchased’ a 13-year-old girl as part of an exposé of child prostitution.) At Newgate Gaol, established in the ...”