“... of Smolensk. Of course, Kutusov’s reputation with posterity owes much to Tolstoy’s portrait in War and Peace, where the drunken old womaniser is depicted as a Russian father-figure of great cunning and latent genius, capable, in some mystically inspired way, of drawing the last ounce of effort out of the stolid, brave moujiks that made up the mass of the ...”

“... intellectualism of Salisbury is democracy’s opposite: pessimistic, anti-urban, openly seeking class conflict in order to strengthen the hand of authority and the ancien régime. Salisbury was skilled in questions of international affairs, and in matters of Church politics, admirably discussed by A.N. Porter and E.D. Steele. Other essays give specialist ...”

“... bed and a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums – we feel her Desire as a burdensome weight. When the War starts, Cook suffers from nerves, and Wyndham still plans to go back to RADA to finish rehearsals for Hedda Gabler. ‘A German play,’ explains her mother’s companion, straight out of Ivy Compton-Burnett: ‘you don’t mean you’re still going ahead ...”

“... on 8 June, then we won’t play by their rules either.‘Is there anyone alive who has heard class war rhetoric like this from a Labour leader, when fighting to win a general election?’ ITV’s excitable political editor, Robert Peston, asked the same day. It was bracing stuff, and if you’re sympathetic (perhaps even if you aren’t; Brexit and ...”

“... in public life, at the age of 35. My Who’s Who is silent as to what Eccles was doing before the war, but we learn from one of the introductory pages he has written for this book that since 1932 he had been chairman of a company which had built, and was operating, the Santander-Mediterraneo Railway in northern Spain, with its main station in Franco’s old ...”

“... Vaillant, representing the unity of the French and German proletariats against militarism and war. Lafargue was one of the first socialist deputies elected to the French Assembly. His maiden speech was heckled from all sides. Engels wrote comfortingly that it was only these ‘violent interruptions’ that had prevented him from making his points clearly ...”

“... The swimming pool of SS ‘Imperator’ on her maiden voyage in 1913. Before the First World War, liners were designed to conceal as far as possible from passengers the fact they were at sea. The Lusitania was styled like a floating country house. With stuccoed ceilings, stained glass, palm courts and grand pianos, it looked as if it might sink under the ...”

“... reads aloud from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then appearing in the Egoist, and war is declared. It describes two successive changings of the literary guard: from the Great Victorians to the Great Moderns (Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Wells), and from the Great Moderns to really modern Modernism (Pound, Lewis, Eliot, Joyce). It also has ...”

“... I was a student in London and neither at an age nor in the mood for retrospection. The 1914-18 war went unmentioned at home. In April 1918 my father was wounded in the leg and invalided home for several months. Yet he neither limped nor complained of pain. It was the least of his injuries. If I’d asked him about the screams I sometimes heard at night or ...”

“... conference on the state of the planet. She announced that her concern was to right the mess (war, Third World poverty, ecological catastrophe, global capitalism) that her parents had made of the world. It was a moment before, astonished, I realised that she meant me. No dear, I thought, that’s not right. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t us. It was them. It ...”

“... which may or may not be right, but which lends the book a vision and a theme. To write of post-war Britain is to enter a long-running debate over the state of the nation which began about 1960 and has continued ever since. Many conflicting views have been expressed, but strange to say there is one assumption on which almost all participants agree. They all ...”

“... shifts in the British social structure which it manifested. Some take it as inevitable that, once class cleavages of a national character underpinned voting habits, the Labour Party was bound to come into its inheritance and fulfil its destiny. It seems more plausible to others of us, conversely, to regard the downfall of Liberalism as, at least in ...”

“... The title of Orlando Figes’s impressively wide-ranging book refers to a scene in War and Peace in which Natasha Rostov, the finest product of the European education favoured by the Russian aristocracy for more than a century, visits the far from luxurious home of a distant relative. He is a nobleman living in the country with his serf ‘wife’, Anisya; he has, it seems, abandoned that superior attitude to the Russian ‘people’, the narod, that generally characterises his class ...”

“... upheaval, anything to shake up the town. The closest thing we had was the invocation of the War Measures Act by Pierre Trudeau in October 1970, after a series of kidnappings by Quebec separatists. Soldiers with machine guns were posted across the city. Now, more than fifty years after his father called in the army, hundreds of enormous rigs were rolling ...”

“... has been different, but in ways that are not surprising: in England the struggle centred on class, in the US on money. Not that class and money are separable in either country, only that their precedence is reversed. Class – learning the codes of Oxbridge language and conduct ...”