“... Desmond favours a version of ‘was your grandmother a monkey?’, and gives it a plausible class twist. The Bishop was a gentleman, and confident in the identity and ladylike character of his own grandmother, and the grandmothers of the kind of people he sparred with. But Huxley never knew his granny, coming from a stratum where the existence of ...”

“... dainty way around that ‘reeking network of slums’ which is Edinburgh’s Old Town. Social class, inevitably, raises its head from time to time throughout these essays. Elaine Showalter sees the anti-heroes of Ladlit as obsessed with class distinctions, as well as being ‘funny, bright . . . charming and ...”

“... workers and the governing elite. Unemployment surged after the demobilisation of soldiers when war ended in 1815; a severe depression in the textile industry combined with food prices kept high by the protectionist Corn Laws (introduced in 1815) brought the poor to the brink of starvation. The stark new multistorey cotton mills of Manchester and Salford ...”

“... to pursue in minute detail topics as untrendy as the doctrinal disputes of pre-First World War socialists or the social and economic consequences of the Black Plague. That she has escalated her demands during the last twenty years while enlarging the circle of her readers suggests that she is a woman of distinctive talents. Ideally, a consideration of ...”

“... has made possible a mutual East-West re-examination of the twists and turns in the record of Cold War conflict and confrontation. Last February, for example, there was a gathering in Moscow of top-level participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, from both the White House and the Kremlin: they were meeting to discuss how those events unfolded in each ...”

“... away, but the sound of artillery fire is audible only briefly. All the totems of First World War literature are absent, and yet the most interesting thing about the book is that it is even so a story about the war. The novel begins around 1914 and ends a few pages after the ringing of the armistice bells in 1918. There ...”

“... this book is not really about South-East Asia (although that is its setting) or about the Vietnam War (although that is its protagonist’s great obsession). It is not about travel (although its characters are travellers), nor about drugs and violence (although the story contains plenty of both). It is a book about images of all these things, especially ...”

“... in service until her marriage, and the family belonged to what Gray calls ‘the affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was born in 1882, the local market town of Tring and the backwater of Aston Clinton where she grew up, families like the Youngs were held in the orbit of the local landowners, who ...”

“... the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected ...”

“... real. (For ages, I used to wonder why my toilet smelled like the Trench Experience at the Imperial War Museum when I cleaned it, which I did by pouring in limescale remover and bleach. Then I found out that I was, in effect, making poison gas whenever I did this. I asked the IWM how they got such an accurate scent of chlorine and they told me they use ...”

“... commercial development. Those who had bought land in the city centre when it was cheap during the war now became very rich, and office blocks sprang up like mushrooms. Secretaries also did well. Between 1950 and 1962 an unskilled female office worker’s pay rose 180 per cent. By 1962, most girls leaving East End schools, and around one in five boys, went ...”

“... of vast state-funded social projects, but on the mid-20th century as a period in which middle-class modernist housing was built on a large scale in places like the inner suburbs of South London. It was housing you might not be able to afford yourself, but which you could take as a model when furnishing your own more mundane home.Every era creates its own ...”

“... kings which in the Thirties became a Communist stronghold, the occasion was packed with Serb war veterans. The young workers who were there must by now have been recruited into the Federal Army, and sent to fight against Croatia. That the Krusevac ceremony was a requiem, not only for the Partisan dead, but also for Yugoslavia, was already clear. For at ...”

“... in Bosnia. It is a chronicle of Brkic’s Bosnian Croat family, from the end of the First World War to the present day (Brkic’s father emigrated to the US in 1959 and she was born there). The emphasis is on war: the Second World War, but especially the wars between Serbs and Croats in ...”

“... Mies van der Rohe created his German pavilion in the city – and the end of the Spanish Civil War had a profound impact on Tàpies. As Catalan politics became more polarised, the revulsion against Spain grew more pronounced. My parents considered the world of bullfights, flamenco (they called it ‘maid’s singing’), and all the manifestations and all ...”