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“... From the 1870s, when members of a secret organisation of Irish coalminers, the Molly Maguires, were executed for allegedly assassinating Pennsylvania mine owners and their henchmen, to the summer’s day in 1920 when an Italian anarchist called Mario Buda ignited his dynamite-laden horse-drawn wagon outside the Morgan bank on Wall Street, killing more than 30 bystanders, America was wracked by extraordinary political and civil violence, most of it initiated by the country’s new industrial overlords and their political allies ...”

“... Half a century ago it would have come as no surprise to find demonstrating workers from both the public and the private sectors occupying the state house in Madison, Wisconsin along with students, community organisations and church groups. And it isn’t only in Wisconsin – much the same is happening in Ohio and Indiana and elsewhere. Legislative action in Wisconsin has come to a halt as the Democratic Party minority in the state senate, in sympathy with the public workers, has fled the state to make it legally impossible to conduct business ...”

“... No one can deny the democratisation of affluence that flowed from the ‘Treaty of Detroit’, as Steve Fraser calls it in The Age of Acquiescence. But the hidden cost of the agreement was the erosion of any notion that organised labour could foster an ethos of solidarity – an alternative to the dominant culture of individual accumulation. ...”

“... empire of material desire, of consumption, of get rich now. You might call it an empire of greed. Steve Fraser is a fine New Deal historian whose biography of the union leader Sidney Hillman, wistfully entitled Labour Will Rule, chronicled labour’s ascent into the top ranks of the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s. He flatly admires the ...”

“... blackguard Flashman, who never speaks to one without a kick or an oath’. George MacDonald Fraser’s series of novels about him – known collectively as The Flashman Papers, the first of which appeared in 1969 – are, I would guess, read much more widely than their worthy Victorian forebear, and deservedly so. Ditching all that pious ‘muscular ...”

“... in the Middle Ages among the fighting families of the Anglo-Scottish Border, as George MacDonald Fraser’s book The Steel Bonnets makes clear.* His synonymous reivers, raiders or riders used to get off their horses and play the football that became soccer and rugby, and they were not afraid of a few fouls: ‘some quarrel happened betwixt Bothwell and the ...”

“... David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any longer. A lot of these commentaries appeared online, some of them only online, where they are now archived among the thousands of articles the Guardian has published on Corbyn or ...”

“... It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It is ...”

“... day to this, has remained the real power centre of the Korean regime. One key Moonie sympathiser, Steve Kim, left the Army immediately to join the KCIA and became Kim Jong Pil’s indispensable aide, acting as the intermediary between the KCIA and CIA. Another young Moonie officer, Aka Bud Han, also became an assistant to the premier/KCIA chief, acting, for ...”