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“... house weekend, rather than in a glorified warehouse at a posh version of Flog It! With upper-class insouciance the diamond brooches were shown alongside the cups and saucers, the well-worn chintz, table lamps and signed copies of the works of Alan Titchmarsh. Anyone hoping for crumbs from the great collections at Chatsworth was disappointed. This was the ...”

“... the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph sets out, if not to rescue that persecuted class (of which he is ‘in part’ a member) from extinction, then at least ‘to engender a change’ in ‘the present climate’ of anti-toff feeling. His argument, broadly, is that the aristocratic tradition in Britain has been predominantly one of public ...”

“... Some see the claim as further proof of the stultifying grip of a long-established class formation on so many areas of national life, while others delight in the easily comprehensible fretwork of family trees in a Downton Abbey version of intellectual history.Perhaps the most influential elaboration of the allegedly distinctive kinship pattern ...”

“... air and knew or suspected the truth: here was a man locked in combat over the future of a working-class party who was born to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an ...”

“... on this scale against so much competition cannot be attributed merely to the preference of middle-class parents for books about genteel children. As Brogan reminds us, Ransome could write with real sympathy about lower-class children and adults, and his middle-class ‘Swallows’ surely ...”

“... set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead and was beaten almost into blindness; prisoners secretly gave her their social security numbers to prove their existence to the outside ...”

“... Warships​ are built for war, but not only for war. They have always had an eloquent symbolic value as expressions of power, wealth and resolve, as instruments of threat or reassurance. They speak this language in peacetime just as much as in war ...”

“... al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally. Sadat wore a Prussian-style uniform but no ...”

“... Daughter’, say, or The Marble Faun. Especially since the Second World War, most 20th-century commentators have preferred to echo Melville’s celebrated remarks on his contemporary’s ‘great power of blackness’. If we are to credit Dearest Beloved, T. Walter Herbert’s dramatic reinterpretation of life among the ...”

“... to demythologise ‘Thatcherism’. Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed two advantages over any other post-war premier. First, her arrival in Downing Street coincided with North Sea oil. The importance of this windfall to the Government’s political survival is incalculable. It has brought almost 70 billion pounds into the Treasury coffers since 1979, which is ...”

“... their own superiority. One of these was the remnant of the old territorial aristocracy, the upper class which had been inconvenienced by austerity and the postwar lack of servants but which still held on to its country seats and its influence. Another was the world of the two ‘historic’ English universities – the ‘top’ colleges of Oxford in ...”

“... and dilemmas of collaboration, of families divided, of fighting on one’s own soil, of civil war – the stuff of life for most Europeans only forty years ago, and a more recent or continuing reality for millions in the Third World. As for revolution, its literature by and large has been for us the literature of the revolution betrayed, the revolution ...”

“... a white English-speaking male preoccupation, founded in a selective view of history that portrays war as inevitable, noble and glorious, where Britain and the majority white countries of its former empire repeatedly come together to defeat a savage foe (Prussian militarism, in Norton-Griffiths’s case, but it might just as well be Nazi Germany, the Soviet ...”

“... the book. Yet less than a decade before Ferguson’s idyllic stay there, Kenya had been wracked by war, with much bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities on all sides. It was wrong to say that ‘scarcely anything had changed.’ Not that the young Ferguson would have been aware of that in the 1960s; but by the time he came to write his book, some knowledge of it ...”