“... century its docks handled 40 per cent of global trade. But decline set in after the First World War. By the 1970s and 1980s, the churning forces of capitalism and imperialism had receded, leaving the city stranded and struggling. As Wetherell writes, the ‘mystifying tendency for the spaces of everyday life to be dissolved and remade by capital had stalled ...”

“... Government, but the power of organised labour too, making the ultimate triumph of a black middle class all the more certain. The most radical workerists, such as the National Forum’s Neville Alexander, argue that a. the South African revolution must be won by the black working class, b. that sanctions inevitably inflict ...”

“... of proto-socialist ideal society, one has to explain how it can have been destroyed by a civil war within the Committee of Public Safety and the execution of half a dozen deputies. If Thermidor and the Directory marked the triumph of a (never defined) bourgeoisie, why were the new men such incompetent actors of their historical roles? When politics had at ...”

“... revealing the characteristic blindness of the elite to the habitual discomforts of the working class – ‘are more annoyed by hardships and rough living than their masters.’ It was far more ‘agreeable and advantageous’ to hire a local, so long as no antiquarian knowledge was expected, let alone trusted if offered. For that, (hand)books were the ...”

“... just as your average Afghan bazaar is for newly arrived visitors from London. In the former upper-class residential area of Wazir Akhbar Khan, the Western embassies lurk behind high walls and rolls of barbed wire, while the NGOs and media organisations have taken over the villas of the former elite. Repeated lootings have emptied the villas of much of their ...”

“... effects of escalating militancy ruined suffrage’s prospects in the years immediately before the war, but when the issue re-emerged in 1916, its male and female opponents still could not get along. Curzon, convinced the cause was lost and accustomed to backroom deals, declined to lead a last-ditch battle in the Lords and pragmatically abstained on the vote ...”

“... of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities, especially of the southern colonies, could most aptly be characterised as agrarian precapitalist and … Will, who at this point … is completely fed up, includes himself in the conversation. WILL: Of course that’s your ...”

“... of British defences, it would be argued that he was trying to overthrow Baldwin. The Second World War enabled Churchill to turn the tables on the sceptics. Having imposed his authority as a war leader, he proceeded to impose the Churchillian interpretation of events, enshrined in a six-volume ...”

“... to commemorate the men from the Great Eastern Railway Company who had died in the First World War. The guest of honour was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who unveiled a memorial in the station’s booking hall. It was marble, seven metres high and eight metres wide, and recorded the names of the 1220 men who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to ...”

“... life, festivals and protests are the people who lived in what was then a diverse, largely working-class neighbourhood. A family of five stick their fingers in their ears as they stand behind a crash barrier, waiting to watch the demolition of a council tower block. Two women with blue rinse hairdos are caught mid-conversation as they balance crates of Skol on ...”

“... So he was a ‘fellow-traveller’ from 1932 up to and beyond the start of the Second World War. The shift was easy to understand. The crisis of 1929 and the impotence of any government, but especially the Labour Government, to soften its dreadful effects, suggested that there was no solution to capitalism save to overthrow it. There was no point in ...”

“... politics that claims to be present in all their responses – requires them to wage factitious war as a matter of display. The cuckoo may be determined to take over the nest, as Gross fears, but that too is seen from both sides as more show, gambit and stratagem than reality: an aspect of the technique of presenting the literary past and present in ...”

“... The Meeting at Telgte, addresses directly the fate of the Writer. At the close of the Thirty Years War Germany’s leading poets and scholars meet at an inn in the small town of Telgte near Münster, where the peace negotiations are being protracted, to read their works to each other, to discuss literary principles, and especially to consider whether there is ...”

“... generation of political leaders may have to be sacrificed. There is no doubt that the political class has been badly frightened by the public response to the paedophile affair – and been galvanised into quite untypically rapid action. Even King Albert, an easy-going monarch who involves himself as little as possible in public affairs (unlike the more ...”

“... late 1970s. Shepherd sees Lansbury’s evolution into a Cockney icon as a parable of the working-class boy made good by a conversion to socialism. But some of the photographs which illustrate the book suggest that Lansbury belonged more to the patrician wing of late Victorian radical Liberalism. Snapshots from the family album depict him as, variously, happy ...”