“... of which he was the self-appointed mythologer. Whatever his doubts about the philistine middle-class Gaels who made the revolution, one of whom compounded the offence by stealing his sweetheart as well as his political thunder, his poetry remains on terms with politics in a way that much English Modernism does not. In these volatile conditions, the poet ...”

“... of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class communities were apparently able to learn the useful strategies of liminality, of being both part of the culture that surrounded them by class allegiance and sympathy (as in the case of the Roberts and Evans ...”

“... fittings. Multibillionaires don’t tend to have great taste.In a half-facetious account of social class in the United States in the early Reagan era, Paul Fussell – better known for his cultural histories of the First and Second World Wars – mapped yacht ownership onto position on the social ladder. ‘Because it’s the most expensive, yachting beats all ...”

“... British colonialism in India and Afghanistan, and some later activists campaigned against the Boer War or threw their weight behind the anti-colonial movement in Egypt. Joyce himself was deeply sympathetic to the cause of Greek independence. As Perry Anderson wrote, ‘few rhetorics have been more repetitively general in [the 20th] century than claims for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... professional and business fraternities. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... detail the refinements and changes in Hobbes’s ideas about freedom as the English Civil War proceeded. His account of Hobbes is characteristically lucid, elegant and, on its own terms, persuasive. It is indeed very hard to make sense of Hobbes – or any other political thinker – without situating him within the urgent debates of his time and ...”

“... made up of journalists, army pensioners, Nonconformists, progressive aristocrats and middle-class families living in the newly built villas. But with limited imagination for the inner lives of others, and little patience with her own, Thompson’s account of Laura’s adolescence is brief and not entirely kind: She fell into hero-worship of an elderly ...”

“... Clancy, who spent his last thirty years in Los Angeles writing screenplays, among them In Love and War (1996), about Ernest Hemingway’s First World War experiences, and Frida (2002), a biopic about Frida Kahlo, had been a ‘movie balcony bug’ from the age of five. ‘The heart,’ he wrote, ‘never has to be lonely in ...”

“... reinforcing our sense of innate British superiority, instead reveal the truth about our own scene: class struggle, violence, exploitation. Alan’s infatuation with the film star Louise Vipond is drunkenly transferred, in a slapstick ventriloquial routine, to a tailor’s dummy, figuring forth, in the words of the Chorus, ‘the general love’ for a fantasy ...”

“... And things may be different at Harvard. Those who know Pipes only as a hardliner during the Cold War heyday of the Reagan years may doubt his credentials as an iconoclast. But what else is one to call someone who invokes Lytton Strachey (twice!) as an exemplar in the writing of history and quotes with approval Samuel Butler’s ‘I never write on any ...”

“... than the structural injustices of capitalism, even though the ANC – which read racism back onto class struggle – used his work to publicise their cause. White employees in the mines, he noted, ‘even those working underground, and designated as miners, never touch pick or shovel or drilling machines. The brute work is done by Africans.’ His photos of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”