“... 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 ...”

“... operations of the East India Company and, less directly, about the economic assumptions of middle-class life in the opening years of the 19th century. Oblivious of new-historical talk about the interaction of literature with other ‘signifying practices’, Hayter does not treat the sinking of the Abergavenny as a marginal anecdote that can be made to ...”

“... been present in ‘the domain of regular government’ since the defeat of the South in the Civil War. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was the first film screened at the White House, during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (Wilson was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan). The Southern ‘Dixiecrats’ had a seat at the table in FDR’s administration, allowing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But Brexit is not the only factor. Ironically, the increasing diversity of the British political class has presented people with an expanded range of targets for their anger. After decades in which Parliament was overwhelmingly a boys’ club, a record number of MPs are women – 211 in the outgoing parliament. Women politicians, especially younger ...”

“... in his reflections on the success of pro-Franco propaganda in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. ‘I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that ...”

“... takes to be the result of the incestuous intermarriages of a small community. The Parsi boys in my class had legendary Persian names like Jehangir and Kaikobad and Khusro. Their surnames, however, can be faintly ridiculous in their eloquence, like ‘Sodabottleopenerwalla’. A Parsi writer I have read from boyhood onward is Busybee, the columnist. His real ...”

“... classes sometimes behave in pretty mechanistic fashion, and his individual actors carry class labels tacked on to their names, reminding us of their ineluctable destinies), but at least we know where we stand. There is no flummery or mystification. Four basic propositions are stated concerning the Revolution. First, strong currents of popular ...”

“... businessman, who had found me when I was standing up by a window outside my compartment. A fourth-class compartment. The seats made of wood. It was the class called ‘travelling hard’. ‘Ah,’ said the irontongued German, speaking French for no particular reason except perhaps for its relation to Feydeau, ‘vous aurez ...”

“... have often been as important as the boundary between England and Scotland, or Wales and England. Class alignments and levels of urbanisation complicate this north-south divide, but it remains significant in terms of income, longevity, diet, cultural behaviour, politics and much more, and it has been persistent. In the late 15th century, English monarchs felt ...”

“... and that the intruders show their contempt for their victims by defecating in their living-rooms. Class elements are present in the reporting of crimes of passion, which the elite naturally associate with slum-dwellers and squatters: the second type of crime involves something approaching class warfare. But the dominant ...”

“... The ‘law of war’ is a paradox, an exercise by turns noble and futile. ‘A remedy must be found,’ Grotius wrote, ‘for those who believe that in war nothing is lawful, and for those for whom all things in war are lawful.’ Geoffrey Best, in his magnificent exposition of the modern pursuit of legal restraint on warfare, opens with another aphorism, from Hersch Lauterpacht: ‘If international law is, in some ways’ at the vanishing-point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing-point of international law ...”

“... to suffer, to fear that they might think him common, or, nastiest of all their put-downs, middle-class. Betjeman was undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of self-contempt. That this portrait of him should be so enormously detailed testifies to the author’s ...”