“... that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to reality-status might be found off-puttingly vehement. Still, her book, risking as it does a limiting categorisation and, inescapably, a caricaturing treatment of its subject, is the only one of the five which, making a serious ...”

“... was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic emancipation, thinking it wrong that a religious minority should have all the power in Ireland. Yet he was responsible for a political act he came to regret – the so-called Gregory Clause, an amendment inserted in a Poor Law Bill ...”

“... will cut much ice with the sleuths. As trained journalists they will interpret the affair in class terms. For was not the upper middle class in England before the war itself much like a spy network, a nest of Freemasons whose emblem was not an apron but the old school tie, quick to ...”

“... is new, however, is that everyone knows this is not going to last. For the first time since the war, Europe is living in anticipation of vast but still imponderable changes to the part that has stood for the whole. Three dominate the horizon. The first is, of course, the Treaty of Maastricht. We can set aside its various rhetorical provisions, for vague ...”

“... about this group of oppressed persons or that. The RCP wasn’t really interested in working-class struggle, or Third World liberation struggles, or any other wretched-of-the-earth-type struggle at all. ‘Although I only became aware of this much later,’ one 1980s RCPer wrote recently, ‘young RCP comrades … were by and large simply not ...”

“... to kill my child, and I’d fight like the devil. But if I had been called up to fight the Lebanon war of ’82 I’d not go. I’d go to jail,’ said Amos Oz, his voice gathering strength as he spoke. At a different point in our conversation he said: ‘If I thought Israel went wrong to the point of no return, I’d leave, but I’d still be Israeli. It ...”

“... and expanding Soviet power westward, which would have been seen as an open invitation to World War Three. Those who lived through the months of the Berlin airlift need no reminding of what a nerve-fraying period it was. The Soviet presence in the heart of Europe was like one of those amorphous monsters which grip and immobilise the sleeper in a ...”

“... Both, moreover, display what I might term ‘the growth of consensus politics among Civil War historians’, establishing their work in a sequence produced by those with whom they differ only on details. Dr Lindley sets out two purposes for his book: to examine the character of the local resistance to drainage schemes in the 17th-century Fenland, and ...”

“... it, let alone achieving a k.o. The Myth has bothered Calder ever since readers of his People’s War (1969) saw the book as confirming it. Because of this unintended deception, he approached the Myth of the Blitz ‘in a spirit almost of self-hatred’, but his determination to ‘undermine the credibility of the mythical narrative ... every which way’ has ...”

“... For Tolstoy and Hemingway, as for Homer, writing about war was the natural thing. They did not exactly worship the demands of ‘hateful Ares’, as Homer calls him; but they knew that war as hell was the proper field of the heroic, and thus of narrative itself. The story of what happens in a football match today is our equivalent of yesterday’s battle; and it can be established later, as game, in the same heroic sequence ...”

“... in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its emancipation of the slaves. President Lincoln was not willing to ...”

“... movement or tendentious biographies of Tito, there wasn’t much to read about Yugoslavia. Class, not ethnicity, was what most academics had been interested in during the Cold War, but now nationalism was the only thing anyone cared about. That was the subject of West’s book, leavened with her meditations on the ...”

“... If George Orwell had died in 1939 before the outbreak of war (something perfectly possible, for in the previous year he suffered a bad haemorrhage and spent nearly six months in a sanatorium), he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels, a lively account of a few hard weeks in Paris, a quirky book about the miners that was somehow combined with an attack on sandalled vegetarian socialists, and another about the Spanish Civil War that some reviewers praised but nobody read ...”

“... by changing hands privately. I thought this was common knowledge but in Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class Robert Lacey assures us that there had never been a ‘tradition of selling ... classic, museum-quality masterpieces at auction – at Christie’s or anywhere else’ before the end of the First World War, when ...”

“... In American Pastoral, the protagonist’s daughter ‘is chaos itself’; protesting the Vietnam War, she visits ruin on her family’s suburban paradise with an act of murderous violence. And in I Married a Communist, Roth’s most recent novel, the three protagonists of the book’s venomous revenge drama are all at the mercy of their escalating and rather ...”