“... its ranches: Edie was born there, in Santa Barbara. Fuzzy had failed to pass the medical test for war service, something that hurt him deeply: it is not being glib or sensational to say that the absence of a war abroad seems to have driven him to stage a war elsewhere. He brought it all ...”

“... as constitutional reform – particularly in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – the Kosovo war and Blair’s address to the nation in the wake of Diana’s death, a moment which ‘confirmed Tony Blair as the consummate political actor of his age’. Yet Rawnsley makes it equally clear that Blair could hardly have cared less about either Wales or ...”

“... in places. If it was puzzling to learn that what was still being called the English Civil War had actually been started by the Scots and had been finally resolved, years later, in Ireland when James II, the last Stuart king, was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689, it was downright alarming to go home and see TV footage of riots at Orange ...”

“... to her might have been anything other than a normal way for the patriarchs of a respectable middle-class family to behave. Sarah Waters’s novels – the first three set in the Victorian era, the more recent two in the 1940s – have always been interested in the ways in which English society has disposed of its more awkward or inconvenient members by locking ...”

“... and looks down on a forgetful Edinburgh. They were casualties of the Tory hysteria of 1793, when war was declared on the French Revolution and the shepherd’s crook of law became, in Wordsworth’s phrase, a tool of murder. But once got rid of they could do no harm, and were not subjected to fetters, forced labour or the lash. ‘Palmer and Muir got land ...”

“... as a response to the fragmentation of 20th-century social structures, as old assumptions around class and gender dissolved. But the 20th century is long behind us, and the stream of novels, films and TV series based on homicidal skulduggery and its detection shows no sign of diminishing. After all, there’s plenty of scope for innovation. Serial killings ...”

“... ambitious intellectual, but one who always conceded Crosland’s superior brain. The Second World War interrupted and leavened his student politics, active service providing its own kind of filter. Afterwards, he returned to university, became president of the Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert ...”

“... and thoroughness at least to parts of the view. We learn quite a lot about how the working-class boy from Broadstairs eased with remarkable speed into an Establishment that was much more rigorously stratified in the Fifties than it is today. Oxford was the class-solvent and the 1939 ...”

“... published was the so-called period of Social Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Second World War. The whole of the second half of Hermann Mannheim’s underrated Criminal Justice and Social Reconstruction (1946) is taken up with an examination of the ways and means of shifting the main emphasis of English criminal law and of standard forms of ...”

“... it has just as much to do with the ruin of actual secular national projects in the context of Cold War, resource imperialism, the attentions of the IMF. But actual shipwreck could have elicited no more than despair and anomie. These exist, no doubt, but also elation, inventiveness, ruthlessness, dedication to death. Certain religions believe they are once ...”

“... was clapping and cheering. It was like the building was coming down.’ Next day, her French class had to be cancelled because half the school was playing truant at the Obama rally. Age, gender, race and class have featured so prominently in the quarrel that they’ve sometimes seemed to define it as merely demographic ...”

“... the haste and brutality with which they were undertaken, or the fact that they created a small class of successful post-Soviet winners (like Nemtsov) and a much larger underclass of forgotten and discarded losers. Instead he blamed everything that went wrong in the next 15 years on Putin. ‘When is that bastard finally going to go away?’ he said in ...”

“... are asked on the jacket of Dr Edward Smithies’s book. What did criminals do during the war? How did they meet the challenges of conscription, the black-out, rationing, austerity? How did the Police cope? Understaffed but overburdened with work? What happened to juvenile delinquency, that worrying social problem of the 1930s? Did the violence of ...”

“... mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where fascism took root, it grew rapidly beyond its base among the frustrated lower ...”

“... and the eugenicist organisation that follows from it, stabilises society for ever: no more war; no more social struggle; no more progress. This, essentially, is the donnée of Brave New World. What made that book a bestseller, initially, was its frankness about sex (I can remember it being passed, from hand to grubby hand, in my schooldays in the early ...”