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“... effect – essentially exploitative. And not only in literary terms, since it’s the working-class they’ve always used to demonstrate what it means to be Scottish. One looks for a fresh account, that would try to see working people both as a class and as distinctively Scottish, while freeing that word ...”

“... but the more one browses the more it is apparent that a double standard is operating. In one class, that of the learned editors, the physicists and the cataract surgeons, the subjects’ private lives are either inviolate, or uninteresting, or unknown (save as may be fallibly deduced from ‘He was unmarried’). The second, smaller ...”

“... provided the ultimate assurance of our national survival. For most of that time, during the Cold War, its purpose was clear, though not without controversy. Today’s world is different. Many of the old certainties and divisions of the Cold War are gone. We cannot predict the way the world will look in 30 or 50 ...”

“... survivor’ majority and the ‘healthy breeze-blown’ minority. This group, Scotland’s middle-class professionals, already accustomed to urban life and relatively secure, began to take part in Britain’s most ambitious political and cultural schemes. Empire was one; the expansion of the state after World War Two was ...”

“... island’ of Mull suggest ‘living waxworks representing a past stage of the upper-middle class ...’ There are photographs to reinforce such visual impressions. Here and there readers may come on some puzzling terms. They will only gradually discover that a ‘lazybed’ is a trench for planting potatoes in. Agon is a good Greek word, but scarcely ...”

“... playful connections between the two books. For instance, when he’s 17, at the beginning of the war, Feathers is evacuated, to his desperate shame (he wants to volunteer). In Old Filth, onboard ship, the officers threaten to make him and his friend cook: ‘You couldn’t do worse than this duff.’ In The Man in the Wooden Hat, he reminisces about the duff ...”

“... from Yeats. ‘Virtuoso vulgarity’ indeed. Amis himself sometimes does a borrowing from high-class literature (‘green and pale’; ‘promise-crammed’; ‘the only end of age’) though always when it means something, and where he charitably supposes a decent reader will know not only what it means but where it came from and why it is worth ...”

“... double, while landlords had a tougher time raising rents or ejecting tenants. The onset of war in 1939 further intensified the desire to keep workers happy. In October 1940, the state stopped taxing overtime pay, and the following year it enrolled all retirees in a national health insurance scheme, freeing them from reliance on the churches or public ...”

“... of the population. The number of full-time servicemen and women has halved since the Falklands War in 1982, and has been falling steadily for much longer. Yet the status of the armed forces in wider society has risen sharply, to a level that can feel uncomfortable to anyone with reservations about military violence. The annual pressure on public figures to ...”

“... But as Tobias Wolff cautioned in his mordant memoir of military service during the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh’s Army: ‘Isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of ...”

“... His initial enthusiasm waned, but he remained a party member until 1945 and after the Second World War was judged to be a Nazi sympathiser and banned from teaching. Although he was partially rehabilitated in 1951, subsequent scholarship has uncovered nothing that puts the basic facts in a more favourable light, and has served chiefly to highlight the ...”

“... to analyse the figures according to a particular categorisation of English social classes. This class-scheme was to prove momentous beyond anything he could have foreseen; at the time, its relation to fertility was simply a very pleasing confirmation (almost ironically complete, in fact) of what he already believed about the nation’s ...”

“... suspect, produced by the police detective who was watching him in 1869. (In fact, he was working-class, and 24 years old.) Somewhat later, after seven years’ penal servitude, he was seen by the Irish Parliamentarian F.H.O’Donnell as ‘a tall dark romantic looking man ... more like a starved poet than a revolutionist’. (Davitt in return called ...”