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“... he could ‘use the word “England” without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out “Britain” ’.) The myths of English rural life are of much more importance to recent British history than liberal empiricism has allowed. Pamela Horn’s study is thorough, sensible social history by a scholar who has delved into a vast range of primary ...”

“... a more playful and paternal spin, that same gap between cliché and reality is the subject of Ian Sansom’s book, an alphabetically organised grab-bag of tiny chapters made up of autobiographical reflections, epigrams, anecdotes and irresistible quotations. Chekhov shows up in ‘Fathers’: ‘Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Ham only noticed ...”

“... significance even by so accomplished a book as this. Its author is unlikely to be disappointed. Ian Kershaw’s purpose has not been to write a full biography, or to rehabilitate a politician he considers to have been unjustly neglected. Instead, by examining in great detail one specimen of a particular species, he has made another foray into a well-marked ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... and controversial. He develops a thesis about the decline of leaderships and authority in Britain which may or may not be right, but which lends the book a vision and a theme. To write of post-war Britain is to enter a long-running debate over the state of the nation which began about 1960 and has continued ever ...”

“... that these lairy skiffle boys might have a future. He intuited other futures too: a completely new Britain, culture, world.What was it exactly that Epstein flashed on but Taylor didn’t? Perhaps his own outsider status in postwar Britain – gay, Jewish, not situated quite precisely enough in the nation’s ossified class ...”

“... This year​  marks the sixtieth anniversary of Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain, which gave a pioneering analysis of the ‘anonymous institutions’ that seemed to be running the country, and the relations between them. It was the most famous of several books published in the early 1960s exploring the idea of a British ‘Establishment’, as part of a discussion about failure in economic and social life ...”

“... that these people must now eat for us?” So he fell back into talking about the 1970s war against Ian Smith. This meant nothing at all to young people and it addressed none of today’s problems.’ Second, in past elections Zanu-PF had distributed food and seeds to those with a Zanu-PF card: if you didn’t vote Zanu-PF you didn’t eat. ‘But now everyone ...”

“... but with a new sense of the shifting balance of social and cultural power in late 18th-century Britain. If the cultural societies of the West Midlands appeared marginal to Londoners, Bage was marginal even to these. He remained largely indifferent. He may have regretted not having had a university education – ‘every man now has a mouthful of ...”

“... from a television screen in the living-room.’ In their final paragraph the authors say that had Britain left the Falklanders to their fate on 2 April, the British people’s respect for themselves and their confidence in their political and military leadership would have experienced a severe blow. They concede that colonial wars can have dangerous ...”

“... were given the opportunity. It has also long been known that football has a unique status among Britain’s sports. It was always, however reluctantly, conceded to be the ‘national’ game. But this concession is now much less reluctant. Hardly anyone would deny that football is today central to the public culture of British life: not merely something for ...”

“... to the skies. They belong to a grand design, to a project set to tell the story of modern Britain (modern England as a rule) from 1945 to 1979; the present instalment, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, covers the narrow gap from 1957 to 1959. David Kynaston tells the story in his own measured words, and he also ...”

“... the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ‘absorbed so many imprints that no complete record of them exists’. The archaeology of British publishing shows an industry constantly stripping and reassembling its productive components into new formations. Coalition, then, is neither ...”

“... different world, though. Niall has arrived at Trinity still simmeringly obsessed with Ian, a schoolmate who may, he worries, have finally cottoned on to the nature of his jealousy. One day he catches the eye of a man who looks a little like Ian, a man he has seen before. He follows him, struggling to keep up ...”

“... suspicion persisted. Sharp little verses – by Thom Gunn and John Coleman – were flighted; and Ian Hamilton capped it all with a brilliant and damaging New Yorker profile. Stephen grew used to being abused. He abused himself. He could seem generous and long-suffering, but could hardly be blamed for resenting a few of the more vocal of the new generation of ...”