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“... 1983 is the most important election since the war,’ said my Italian friend, a sociologist, exultantly. ‘After nearly forty years everything is in flux.’ I had rung him the day after the election. He could hardly speak for excitement. The country was stunned. The results had completely flattened the opinion polls, which has been caught with their predictions down ...”

“... vulnerable brother. Robert had been the scientific director of the Manhattan Project during the war and was then occupied with the poisonous politics of America’s postwar nuclear weapons development – politics which brought him down five years later. Robert knew that Frank had lied. Shortly after Frank and his wife joined the Party in 1937, he had told ...”

“... names in the ABC of British Warships with purloined dockyard pencils stamped with the words War Department and the Crown. These were the ships I had seen from our front window – the destroyers Daring and Diamond, the aircraft-carrier Eagle, the cruiser Gambia, the triple-funnelled minelayer Apollo – as they travelled upriver on their way to their ...”

“... draw the demarcation-line between the aristocracy and the rest to take in almost the whole middle class except ‘the rag trade, showbiz and property dealing’. They contend (and under the guise of merely purveying scholarly information spiked with quaint anecdotes, this is quite a contentious book, almost a tract) that the term ‘middle ...”

“... when workers could afford to send their children to college and see them rise into the middle class. But from 1973 to 2015 – the era of globalisation, when many of those jobs vanished abroad – productivity rose 73.4 per cent while wages rose by only 11.1 per cent. Trump argued that this was caused by unrestricted illegal immigration and the ...”

“... out whether any of us – too many for the available chairs – had registered and paid for the class.) Since the publication of The Limits to Capital in the second year of the Reagan administration and at the dawn of what has come to be known as the financialisation of the world economy, the dual movement of Harvey’s career has been to return time and ...”

“... funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ...”

“... Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion. He is introduced to us, not just as a bicycle buff, but as ‘a classical musician and aspiring Argentine tango dancer’, and should therefore ...”

“... about the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No ...”

“... affected were said in the past to have been ‘touched with fire’ (the American Civil War), suffering from ‘shell-shock’ (World War One) or afflicted by ‘traumatic neurosis’ (World War Two). In each instance the symptoms that patients displayed seemed to split along ...”

“... in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause. Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative ...”

“... declining Mirror could be saved only if it was turned into a lively, iconoclastic, working-class paper. With the help of a new editor Bartholomew started the transformation in 1933, using the New York Daily News as a model. Bill Connor, who would become the columnist ‘Cassandra’, was recruited from J. Walter Thompson, where he had been a ...”