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“... persistent and pervasive legacy. It embodied all the social prejudices associated with a class of blue-blooded landowners, in particular their ingrained hierarchical outlook, rooted in agriculture and warfare, that nursed a withering contempt for those who soiled their hands with any kind of trade or commerce, not least when such people began to ...”

“... at one extreme, and antiquarianism at the other, lies a vast terrain which includes the history of class, religion, politics, gender, health, housing, education, leisure, sport, crime – and so on. The result is an increasingly diffuse school of studies which could easily break up into a mass of unrelated specialisms. The Cambridge Social History, edited in ...”

“... historians, to meet Bill Craik, a veteran and pioneer, so I was told, of independent working-class education. The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly ...”

“... aimed at the wilfully blind. Demands. Complaints. Curses. This was not the work of a coven of Class War anarchists but the frantic message-in-a-bottle charter of humans at the end of their tether: marooned exiles who had nothing left beyond a collaboration with the masonry that held them prisoner. The message the dwellings tapped out was ...”

“... its denial of legitimacy to other progressive forces and its assumption that the ‘working class’ (by which is meant the trade-unionised working class) has a special virtue, and a special claim on society, has alienated many who might otherwise support a progressive politics. This explains the paradox that a ...”

“... of bad losers and a broken political system. But it is also an old-fashioned, 20th-century-style class war. Above all, it concerns one of the great dilemmas of democracies: what to do about unacceptable politicians who, for all their obvious iniquities, are elected fair and square. Which is to say that it is the story of Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin ...”

“... To hit back through lesions or drooled ferro-concrete bridges, Jokes and spread-betting, canals, class-war and bombs Flung by staunch hunger-strikers, polis of asbestos spit, Morphing into a stained-glassed, ran-dan, ram-stam disco Of theme-pub banks intact with mahogany counters, Gothic lavvies, high flats, giddy deserts ...”

“... 20th century’ is supposed to have ended in 1989 with the United States winning the Cold War. Yet today America faces a powerful and assertive China, a one-party state with an official ideology it calls 21st-century Marxism, which is busy building a powerful military on the back of an economy set to become the world’s biggest in the foreseeable ...”

“... are being reborn, and even older despotism and gangsterism are as lively as ever. The Cold War is over, but the hot wars are getting hotter. As the world collapses into what is conventionally called ‘anarchy’, it may be worth taking more serious thought about alternatives to the way we live now, and in particular about what is more correctly called ...”

“... context that Ferdinand Mount’s book Mind the Gap is so welcome. He has written an essay about class in which it is possible to disagree with almost every assertion and produce counter-examples for almost every fact, but which gives the strange, giddy-making sensation that there is a source of oxygen somewhere in the room. This is in considerable part ...”

“... for cultural continuity with anxieties about labour-market competition, and dividing the working class along ethnic lines. Both Trump’s victory and the Brexit vote were primarily the work of affluent old people in coalition with poorer white voters. This is a novel coalition, especially in Britain, where wealthy south coast retirees have rarely if ever ...”

“... that the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who was one of the few to say before the war that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction, had urged MPs to hold a fresh inquiry into the use of intelligence before the war even started. He said that British intelligence had run a campaign to exaggerate Iraq’s ...”