“... 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 ...”

“... kind of popularity which dominates a mass market, but they gave the client’s product a touch of class. The BBC, before it knew what a ratings war was, and Vogue, before the advertising pages got to be smarter than the editorial ones, used them. Minton was briefly one of the frail pillars of that universe of good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... closed to them in May 1940 with ‘the final collapse of Chamberlain’s efforts to end the war’, as the authors inaccurately put it. Churchill disliked Scottish Conservatism, and the corporative-regionalist policies followed both by wartime and postwar governments had no place for them. They were further isolated by the remarkable invasion of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’ It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all. The ...”

“... life, especially her love life, he argues, reveals the tensions inherent in the urban middle-class experience during this period: between older and younger generations, between respectability and opportunity, between the public perception of events and reality.Frieda arrived in Berlin from the country in 1902, aged 27 and unmarried. As a child she had ...”

“... to go. Forced off the throne by the Allies to secure access to Iranian oil during the Second World War, Reza Shah asked the British to let him go to Canada. Instead, they led him off to India, but in Bombay switched him to Mauritius. There he found the climate disagreeable and managed to be transferred to Johannesburg, where he died. He was subsequently ...”

“... Before long, he had a chance to leave his land and sharecrop with Piet Reyneke, an old Boer War veteran who was well aware what a good stock-farmer Kas was. Kas was happy; he had nothing against Afrikaners as such: Nieman was clearly a complete shit but Reyneke was a good ou (‘chap’). Kas was comfortable with Afrikaners and knew their ways. His ...”

“... an amateur historian and, unlike many survivors, spoke often and vividly of defeat in the Civil War, of having been arrested in France and handed over to the Gestapo, and of the 28 months he had endured in the Flossenbürg camp. He also had administrative experience and contacts in the Catalan parliament, which in 2001 gave him the Creu de Sant Jordi for ...”