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“... of ideas Bennett would never have attempted. There’s a clue in the title. The phrase occurs in Ian Colvin’s ‘Social Survey of the World To-Day’, a chapter in the eighth and final volume of a Universal History of the World first published in 1927. ‘Thus, whereas in China there was an adult working male population of, say, 100 millions, in the United ...”

“... and the British took pride in. Here’s a crude way of putting it: the measure of character, in Britain, was your capacity to put up with something; in America, it was your ability to sort it out. And yet I can’t help feeling, as a naturalised Brit who spent about a third of his childhood in England, that this country has changed – and that what’s ...”

“... reforms. Such measures didn’t go much beyond the reforms brought in by the New Liberalism in Britain before the First World War, but for Mises they were ‘Bolshevism’, and would ‘lead Vienna to starvation and terror within a few days’. ‘Plundering hordes would take to the streets,’ he warned, ‘and a second bloodbath would destroy what was ...”

“... in the Soviet Union they get drunk on vodka; in France they get drunk on wine made from grapes; in Britain lager louts get drunk on lager. Such an international phenomenon, taking up so much time for so many people in so many countries, was hardly likely to escape the attention of the likes of Paul Antze (contributor to Constructive Drinking), who says his ...”

“... Muslim Arab majority, I can instinctively understand both the pressures that produce people like Ian Paisley (in my case, my Lebanese Protestant relations who identified with the Phalanges Libanaises, the Jumayyil family’s proto-fascist party) and the tormented and vulnerable ‘conscience of Ulster Protestants’, a real community which is ‘a people ...”

“... worry, the menfolk are keeping Arlene right. Challenging David Davis to ‘stand up to the EU’, Ian Paisley Jr declared in the House of Commons that ‘It’s about time the government displayed a no surrender attitude – stand up to them, man!’ Sammy Wilson, the DUP member for East Antrim, agreed and spoke of taking the gloves off in the fight with the ...”

“... death in the Birmingham pub bombing gives ballast to Coe’s seriocomic survey of 1970s Britain. Benjamin, a would-be writer, is a dreamy, passive boy who feels ‘destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs’. His schoolfriends – Philip, a conscientious plodder; Doug, a worldly left-wing wit; Harding, an anarchic practical ...”

“... look into the case. To begin with, I spent much time, along with the World in Action journalists Ian McBride and Charles Tremayne, trying to find a police officer involved in the case who would tell a story different from the one told in court. The search proved fruitless. Next we got two independent forensic scientists to test Skuse’s evidence. They ...”

“... suicide or an accident.There’s also the question of what he was called. Before settling on Ian Robert Maxwell he had repeatedly changed his name according to the political needs of the moment. Born Abraham Leib Hoch into a Yiddish-speaking community in the town of Solotvino, then in Czechoslovakia and today in Ukraine, he had used ten different names ...”

“... contemporary biology should be able to follow her. Especially successful is her account of the way Ian Wilmut and his co-worker Keith Campbell managed to trick nuclei from differentiated cells into behaving like their embryonic counterparts. The biochemical constitution of a cell varies throughout the cycle, and there is a phase in which the cell ...”

“... which made the new state more alien still to Northern Protestants. What had been separated by Britain was further divided by Irishmen largely unconscious of the significance of their acts. One other factor helped to make the political division more lasting than it might have been: the South remained neutral in the Second World War, fearful lest ...”

“... the union ladder and, by the age of 35, had become president of the largest mineworkers’ area in Britain. Yorkshire had already, and in a very short space of time, ceased to be a right-wing – which is to say, anti-Communist – redoubt, an achievement due in large measure to the efforts of the Communist Party, which in 1950 had placed the Canadian ...”

“... is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the principal industry is, or was, mining. Gabriel García Márquez once described Chile as ‘a cornice of the Andes in a misty sea’. One could push this too far, no doubt (the sheer quality of Chilean wine ...”

“... electricity shortages. The electricity industry consumed three-quarters of the coal mined in Britain, and its re-organisation had a special appeal as the means to crush the NUM – particularly in the wake of Thatcher’s own showdown with the miners. This, as Steve Jones points out in one of the essays here, is what the Government had in mind when ...”

“... step the exercise will have been a hollow one.’ We learn that the poor are better housed in Britain than in France, but we are less generous to larger families. Therefore in Britain the family allowance should be increased and in France they should do something about housing. There would then, presumably, be greater ...”