“... working in concert. Neighbourhoods are broken apart, the dispossessed herded into the working-class suburbs to the north and east of the city. Money takes over. Life proceeds through indirect contact, calculation and enumeration supplant the old social relationships. Meanwhile, among the expanding middle class, leisure ...”

“... multi-directional split of the electorate’ on certain deeply-felt issues, which he lists as class, clericalism, the constitution and colonialism. He writes about the Left, the Right and the Centre, and uses terms like ‘majority’ and ‘opposition’, but without attaching any significance to this terminology beyond what can be explained by the ...”

“... or irritated gesture on the part of a small intellectual élite around the time of World War One has become the firm orthodoxy of the middle-brow mass. The Victorians have retained their demonised status despite the emergence of powerful rivals, as later periods slip back across the line marking off the historical past. Even the Sixties have come in ...”

“... if necessary, language into his meaning.’ But ‘the poet’, in Eliot’s sentence, has upper-class responsibilities which don’t exert much of a claim upon Harrison’s working-class sensibility. He prefers to write of local occasions: how things are going in Newcastle, what’s new in Leeds, hard living in foreign ...”

“... and cultural, educational and moral’. Like Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, which it resembles (despite major differences in assumptions and methods) in its combination of analytical and imaginative power and in its vigorous prose, not to mention its length, it is a major contribution to social history and one of the seminal works ...”

“... armies. The only form of warfare in which such forces can survive is irregular or guerrilla war, and Emmet had no idea of this. (Indeed Elliott shows that the United leadership had a ‘terror of popular guerrilla warfare’.) The inner contradiction of conspiratorialism, which she does not really confront, is that the secrecy vital to the preparatory ...”

“... a world very similar to that inhabited by his Virginian ancestors in the days before the Civil War. Baker’s mother and grandmother worked without benefit of electricity, gas or plumbing. While their menfolk laboured in the fields, they killed chickens, canned vegetables, scrubbed floors, baked bread, chopped wood and hauled water. After days of such ...”

“... after September 1939 when Sartre was called up and after June 1940 when he was a prisoner of war. They reveal what is often forgotten – that Sartre had an excellent sense of humour. There is nonetheless something disagreeable, and eventually tedious, about his insistence on telling Beauvoir about his affairs with other women. In the spring of 1948 when ...”

“... in Mao’s long career that he was evidently proud of, alongside victory in the 1946-49 Civil War; he said as much when he was interviewed by the American journalist Edgar Snow in the 1970s. It was also the most dramatic expression of his antagonism towards intellectuals, a consistent trait in his otherwise capricious career. From 1951, campaigns of ...”

“... brands were planning to raise their prices, millennials started to queue outside the shops. Middle-class Chinese usually go abroad on holiday and to do their luxury shopping, but this year, thanks to Covid-19, the estimated $300 billion spent on overseas consumption is staying at home. This is good news for the government: boosting domestic demand is central ...”

“... married women gained legal personality only in 1938 and it took the trauma of the Second World War to usher in women’s suffrage in 1944.Historians have puzzled over the reticence of democratic France – one of the earliest adopters of universal male suffrage in 1848 – to grant equal rights to women. In Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996), Joan Wallach ...”

“... determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a compound of his Magic (Swiss) Mountain, his post-war return to Switzerland and, perhaps, his rather landlocked position at the centre of European letters. But the Dybbuk that seems to have taken over Mr Greene’s imagination is specific: German Mann, pre-...”

“... perhaps 40,000 Iraqi civilians. And more than 70 journalists, outnumbering the 69 killed in World War Two, the 63 in Vietnam and the 17 in Korea. The risks involved mean that it is hard to ask whether journalists do a good enough job in telling us what we need to know. Stories are not driven by content alone, but by the way in which they are formulated and ...”

“... resumes in the nude. People learn they must take better care of their bodies and become healthier. Class distinctions, once marked by outward trappings, vanish. As the police are no longer recognisable, everyone polices themselves and there is no longer crime. Somerville and his fiancée decide to live together without marriage; the arts flourish; and the ...”

“... Currency Commission, and was taken into the Treasury as an Economic Adviser at the outbreak of war in 1914. He wrote and lectured copiously on the theory of money, and soon acquired a reputation for audaciousness and outstanding clarity. Yet there is little evidence to support the claim often made that, even before 1914, Keynes was already showing symptoms ...”