“... improper use of public office for private gain – was a charge levelled at the British political class for 150 years, and it still has weight today. Allegations of political corruption cut through to voters because the terms involved are immediately comprehensible: money and greed. Yet while the issues raised are at one level universal, they are also ...”

“... When he died in April 1945 Americans were enjoying unprecedented prosperity and victory in the war had catapulted the country from the margins of international politics to the rank of global superpower. These were some of the most dramatic years in American history and FDR was always centre-stage. Cartoonists regularly depicted him striding into ...”

“... Carter, saying, in essence: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."’ Nouvel Observateur: ‘And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?’ Brzezinski: ‘What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet ...”

“... and of fires and corpses, turned public opinion, in the United States and elsewhere, against the war in Vietnam. There is no certainty that this is true. That war lasted so long that patience was exhausted with quite other political consequences than the present action is likely to give rise to. But it was in any case the ...”

“... That the ‘Great War’ is still deeply disturbing to the imagination came home to one last year, when a First World War tank stood on display in the forecourt of the British Museum. One reacted to the sight with a shudder of horror, and also an obscure resentment – at the idea, which seemed to be implied, that we must now proudly regard this appalling object as part of our ‘heritage ...”

“... Lippmann and J. Robert Oppenheimer – cultivated Jewish men at ease among the gentile ruling class of the early 20th century. Moses’s father, Emanuel Moses, owned a flourishing department store in New Haven and had begun to buy up real estate in the town. But he was ‘too slow and quiet’ for the Cohens, who thought Bella had married beneath her. She ...”

“... to passionate romantic attachments, his male arrogance encouraged by the fact that, thanks to the war, there were, in his generation, far more girls around than boys. The considerable amount of material now available from diaries and letters on his early relationships with Paula Banholzer (who bore his first son, Frank, killed in the Wehrmacht in 1942) and ...”

“... that Englishman. But the Memoirs are really more fiction than fact, and the publication of his war diaries now allows us to understand just how carefully Sassoon created his image of Sherston as Englishman out of chaotic material and experiences which threatened his sense of identity. In his celebrated book The Great ...”

“... from home before and, having grown up in the countryside, knew little about the industrial working class. I found myself surrounded by miners, steel-workers and labourers, who had never possessed pyjamas, who when they spoke of ‘books’ meant the Dandy or the Beano, and whose conversation was an unbroken stream of obscenity. The gloom was leavened only by ...”

“... turn, grew out of the mass trade unions, which were created by Fordism in the first place. Working-class politics were masculine and collective, based on a social identity as much moulded by the factory as the standardised products it turned out. Fordist working-class parties sought access to and, if possible, control of the ...”

“... were practical rather than intellectual. Shepherd was an exception. Her English literature class was for her students’ educational benefit rather than that of the children they might one day teach. ‘I loved her from the first class we had with her,’ my mother said. When my parents moved out to Cults a decade or ...”

“... Patterson, a Chicago attorney who is sympathetic to Long’s project, paints him as a determined class warrior with serious, modernising goals. He was ‘cynically realistic’, Patterson writes, in his pursuit of ‘real ideals’. He may have been ruthless, but in a corrupt world it was better to trample legislative tradition and get bills through than, as ...”

“... given the credit which was his due. Thus the paintings in the Frari record a rivalry almost in the class of the one described a quarter of a century ago by Francis Haskell, between Francesco Morosini, the Venetian Captain-General of the Sea in the later 17th century, and Antonio Barbaro, his subordinate in the war of ...”

“... offstage giant, sometimes a reluctant dictator – until his death in 1935. After the Second World War, Poland’s communist rulers suggested that he had been a fascist, which he never was. Piłsudski accepted diversity and usually respected minorities, especially Poland’s large Jewish population, which gave him electoral support. Liberals and socialists saw ...”

“... itself lately – Leon Trotsky was the first and for some appreciable time the only world-class figure to warn against both Fascism and Stalinism. Even Churchill in his Great Contemporaries gives credit for some part of this achievement to the Old Man. Taking Trotsky’s measure in this way, as human being and as theoretician, we see that all the ...”