“... 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 ...”

“... for the rights and hopes of the House of Stuart, [fallen] on Crecy’s field in the Hundred Years War, and [taken] part in all the great campaigns since then.’ As if that was not enough, all Patton’s warrior forebears materialised at moments of crisis to lend him moral support. After leading an attack on the Western Front in World ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to Europe.In both​ Screech’s and Stanley’s portraits, Edo is a world city – not just world-class in size but connected to world trends and events. This perspective accords with the current generation of writing on the Tokugawa policy of sakoku. Scholars once viewed Japan’s closure as absolute, draconian and costly to its people. Watsuji Tetsurō’s ...”

“... Feminism for the Americas. Mona Siegel’s book begins shortly after the end of the First World War, when hopes for peace and reconstruction were high. President Wilson’s speech on the rights of nations and peoples seemed to promise that small nation-states and imperial territories could look forward to self-determination. Women, many of whom had been ...”

“... politicians, baseball-players – may be a sign of weakness. On the other hand, an upper-class white woman – member of ‘a very specialised herd’ – explains that white Southerners also have their specialised insecurities; she laments the gifted uneducated women of her generation, now hard drinkers or even insane. Down on their luck, white ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rest easily in their graves. It has proved more difficult to kill off Prussia in the mind. Post-war historians in the Federal Republic were soon busy rehabilitating the Borussian state. Influential figures like Gerhard Ritter insisted that the main line of Prussian history had nothing to do with the Third Reich: the aristocratic plotters of July 1944 ...”

“... centre, I saw residents marching through the streets and burning tyres. In Mornag, another working-class neighbourhood, similar actions have been repressed with tear gas. When I travelled north through the city from Bab al-Khadra to Bab Saadoun, street sellers were hawking scavenged electronics, cables and second-hand belts from carts lined with cardboard. In ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”