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“... an interview with Eric Alterman for the latter’s excellent book Sound and Fury, about the pundit class in Washington, Safire conceded that ‘yes, psychologically, he may have been seeking to minimise the relative importance of the crimes committed by his former boss, with this silliness.’ So now I’ve stopped ‘gating’ and will never try it ...”

“... In​ Jill Paton Walsh’s novel Goldengrove (1972), set shortly after the Second World War, the adolescent heroine, Madge, goes on holiday to Cornwall. She falls a little in love with a professor of English literature who has been blinded in action, and reads aloud to him. One of the passages he has her recite is an analysis of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’:Weep me not dead means: ‘do not make me cry myself to death; do not kill me with the sight of your tears; do not cry for me as for a man already dead, when, in fact, I am in your arms,’ and, with a different sort of feeling, ‘do not exert your power over the sea so as to make it drown me by sympathetic magic’; there is a conscious neatness in the ingenuity of the phrasing, perhaps because the same idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse ...”

“... biographical details. Although he was born in Australia shortly after the end of the First World War, Hillary came to England at an early age and had a thoroughly English upper middle-class education – prep school, followed by public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (Trinity College). Despite the influence of his English ...”

“... that it terrifies the tender but not the tough. The narrators of the first two novels, middle-class American citizens, admit to being terrified out of their wits: they fear that the martyr-venerating warriors of Islam and the rough Catholics of Latin America may not be deterred from small-scale warfare by the threat of international escalation. Acts of ...”

“... to this dilemma. Co-opting Hegel’s language, he drew a distinction between people being a class ‘in themselves’, when they are seen to act in their objective material interests, and becoming a class ‘for themselves’, when they self-consciously recognise themselves as belonging to a collective. It is no ...”

“... was about. Taylor’s Bismarck, his Habsburg Monarchy and his famous Origins of the Second World War are all classics, which are regularly reprinted and which have something fresh to say each time you look at them. He was and is a wonderful lecturer. He has combined all of this with a journalistic sideline that would have occupied other men full-time. And ...”

“... Oxford had been followed by a seismic controversy over his book on the origins of the Second World War. I half expected to find a smell of fire and brimstone in the air, and my knees were knocking together as I climbed the last few steps to his rooms in the New Buildings at Magdalen. But there was only the aroma of his pipe tobacco, and some brisk advice on ...”

“... Ronald Reagan left office more popular than any departing President since the end of World War Two. The same month Americans interviewed in a telephone poll achieved on a happiness scale the highest score in decades. Reagan’s popularity and American self-satisfaction have not risen together because of any general improvement in the standard of living: the rich are richer than they were a decade ago, the poor are poorer, and the average American stands about the same ...”

“... with the language of the old professions outranking that of the newer ones, aligns with the class system; in this hierarchy the jargon with the highest status is the Queen’s English. The attitudes of Hudson’s reviewers have become a part of the content of Walter Nash’s book. It is pleasing that a scholar so commonsensically frustrated by modern ...”

“... just a little uncanny. Most of the mayhem transpires within families or between neighbours, and class conflict is often the animating force. The settings are only glimpsed, and language does the job of making the goings-on strange: in ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’, it’s the father’s voice in diary form, his clipped syntax eliding subjects and articles ...”

“... intellectuals were formerly supposed to carry. What is an intellectual? Intellectuals are not a class; they are not by definition significantly political (though the Russians once thought they were); they can’t be relied on to speak truth to power – but they must be something. Collini finds little to interest him in two of the three modern senses of the ...”

“... and of the need for an era of honour after so many years of moaning and lamentation. Class politics also come into it. As Fawaz Gerges observes in his history of Islamic State, al-Qaida’s leadership has in large part been drawn from the elite and professional classes. Islamic State is more of a working-...”

“... to try to say, I ask you to join Iris and me, crossing Devon on a motorbike not long after the war. Empty roads, no crash-helmets. We were going too fast and indulging our childish habit of throwing high-sounding philosophical phrases at each other. (I think this was a hint taken from John Buchan’s autobiography, where he links stretches of countryside ...”