“... the entrants begin to look as if they’ve earned their keep. For one thing, they’ve been in the war. Even if they didn’t fight, they performed wonders of crypto-analysis at Bletchley or they blue-printed some devastating weapon. And if they then went into politics, or returned to the diplomatic, they had bags of time in which to serve with exemplary ...”

“... weeds’ and no furnace, Mason looked to the series books for glimpses of middle-class American culture, city life and the world beyond. These stories shaped her dreams of plenty and her longings for travel and experience; she still has ‘recurring food dreams where I stand in a cafeteria line, and have to choose from a thousand beautiful ...”

“... called The Professor’s House ‘lame’ and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found the war experiences described in One of Ours in D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. After her literary success, Willa Cather led a secure, lofty, comfortable, solidly middle-class life. But it took her forty years to do ...”

“... Pete got some other things from Glen’s mouth, including a fierce description of working-class community, which he believes to be now destroyed, in his native Acton. Glen thinks that this social change had an effect on his music. He’s the Hoggart of Punk. I didn’t realise that people said such things any longer. Intrigued, I went off to Acton to ...”

“... influential political club, the Jacobins, a militant organisation with close ties to the lower-class sans-culottes. Both these groups had mobilised for the purge of the Girondins – as they had for other Parisian uprisings, known as revolutionary ‘journées’ – and their backing gave Robespierre a formidable advantage. This became a cause of ...”

“... were orthodoxies conceived, for the most part, in the decades before and after the Second World War, and were closely linked to the politics of their respective authors: R.H. Tawney and Christopher Hill on the political left, Lawrence Stone in the Whig centre, and Hugh Trevor-Roper on the right. They were comfortable corroborating their own political ...”

“... set six to ten feet apart from each other. The pandemic became another front in the culture war, a supplement to Trump’s bellowing about political correctness. He could stoke fear by claiming that Biden would lock down the country for months: children not going to school would suffer, the economy would turn worse than the Great Depression, and all ...”

“... The first biographies, a pair by Nancy Spain and Montgomery Hyde, appeared soon after the last war, and the reality of Isabella Beeton did then make some headway against the phantom. Today, many people know that she was a newly married woman in her early twenties when she compiled her immense text, and that she died at 29. Some also know that her ...”

“... the form of treaties. These, it was held, developed out of US leadership after the Second World War, but superseded it with the formation of a consensual framework of mutually satisfactory transactions between leading countries. The manifesto of this idea came in Power and Interdependence, a work co-authored by two pillars of the foreign policy ...”

“... West German obsession – Frei’s term – with the release of those held by the Allies as war criminals. Among them were the men convicted at Nuremberg. A larger number were soldiers who had contravened the rules of war by executing POWs or hostages. Most were SS men, party, police and other officials or ...”

“... relationship between the two is explicit, and goes beyond the obvious facts (they are both working-class boys who love football, doubt their friends and defend an honour worn raw by perceived humiliation and injustice). Like Kieron, the hero of ‘Joe Laughed’ finds personal worth in his skill at climbing: both of them worked out when they were small how to ...”

“... Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left had begun to wear thin. The LRB, which appeared to be moving leftward (in reality, Britain had moved to the right), stayed with him, and tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed ...”

“... just one worker into the SWP’s inner ranks. Trotsky’s prediction that the Second World War would end in massive workers’ revolts had failed to materialise. The decision of GM workers in 1948 to accept a contract forbidding them from going on strike, Biehl writes, demonstrated to Bookchin once and for all that [the working-...”

“... on with the right-wing talk-radio shock jocks. All of a sudden they’ve stopped pounding the war drums and gone back to custody battles being unfair to fathers and why we ought to send the Mexicans back to where they came from. It’s as if word came from upstairs, at both channels, KLBJ and the CBS affiliate. A minute ago the story they were all ...”

“... in another paragraph about ‘the darkest period of public anti-communism, the years of the Korean War’. Hobsbawm mentions being ‘acutely unhappy’ in the early 1950s but skitters away from any further revelations. He reminds himself of the difference between historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means ...”