“... so much about the horrors of Nazism and so little about those of Communism? Was the early Cold War theory of ‘totalitarianism’ as wrong as a generation of scholars in the Seventies and Eighties argued it was? What, if any, were the causal connections between the two great horrors? In France, and now in Italy, the debate has been sparked by the recent ...”

“... politicised or on the brink of being so. She focuses on the years running up to the First World War, when strikes, disputes and grassroots political activity in Britain were at a height. Female membership of trade unions was growing and suffrage agitation brought women onto the streets in unprecedented numbers. Both movements fostered self-confidence and a ...”

“... many of the necessary skills at the Bar before being lured away from Lincoln’s Inn in 2005. Class, the brusque midwife presiding at the birth of rugby league in England, gets very little say in the French story, although the ideal of the peasant character is briefly on display, before it gets drafted into a bigger plot to do with regionalism and ...”

“... and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former fanzine which the editor, John Carnell, had managed to keep sporadically in print – was purchased by the ...”

“... and blamed the aristocracy for falling for it. In this view the humiliations of the Crimean War were a direct consequence.The music of the Oxford Movement came quickly into the firing line. Looking back in 1889 the Musical Times complained:Few things have contributed more effectively to perpetuate in this country the prejudice against the musical ...”

“... overall growth rates, it was with the recession of 1973-74 that the surge after the Second World War gave way to deceleration across the wealthy world. Intellectually, Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize of 1976 signalled the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism; thereafter orthodox economics was more concerned with low inflation than full ...”

“... state collapse, military tyranny, imminent Islamist revolution, terrorist takeover and a nuclear war with India. All these dangers are present, but with the possible exception of war with India, none is as great as is usually argued. By far the greatest long-term threat is one that our media hardly ever discuss, since it ...”

“... dormitories. Such is the gang spirit. Then, in our teens or twenties, we entered the mob, post-war conscripts in the years of National Service: here the public schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his ...”

“... religious unity in order to ‘discourage envy of the better-off’, so effectively that ‘class is everywhere in Punjab’s politics, yet rarely in people’s minds.’ Some play has also been made with socialistic ideals allegedly to be found in Sikh teaching, and implying – like the ‘Islamic Socialism’ talked of from time to time in Pakistan ...”

“... almost prefer to let them escape with the cheese than to pounce. Angleton was tipped off after the war by Jewish Intelligence to the effect that a British physicist working on nuclear weapons development in the States was a Soviet spy. This was the man Boyle calls ‘Basil’, or ‘the fifth man’. He was easily turned round by the Americans, after he had ...”

“... pointed to the differences between the two countries: one small, well-educated, largely middle-class; the other the largest in terms of population in the Arab world, with a high rate of illiteracy and ever widening inequality. Tunisia was a repressive police state in which information was tightly controlled and most people never dared to criticise the ...”

“... of Ontario between Toronto and Lake Huron, and to be white, Christian, prudish and dangling on a class rung somewhere between genteel poverty and middle-class comfort. Occasionally they move to the vicinity of Vancouver, only to go back to Ontario again. If this patch of the North Country sounds like a provincial ...”

“... we catch up with him at the beginning of Magic Seeds, he has left Africa and is living in Cold War Berlin with his sister Sarojini, ‘in a temporary, half-and-half way’. His search for a place in the world, for wholeness, starts again as if from scratch. Sarojini, like her brother, has also made an ‘international marriage’, to Wolf, a radical-chic ...”

“... is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini. Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s ...”

“... and 1930s – not surprisingly, since of all the European upheavals at the end of the First World War, theirs was the only revolution that succeeded. But the trouble with leading the world revolution, as far as Stalin and his associates were concerned, was that you had to deal with foreigners. Abroad was scarcely less of a problem for them than for Lord ...”