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“... wish to become a meteorologist was now overwhelmed by the urge to write poetry. In ‘To World War Two’, written half a century later, Koch recalls thinking: ‘If I’m killed while thinking of these lines, it will be too corny When it’s reported’ (I imagined that it would be reported!) So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on ...”

“... as a fable of how the militantly anti-bourgeois frequently turn out to have been solidly middle-class all along. Spiotta herself was born in 1966. She published her first novel, Lightning Field (LA, hyperconsumerism, anomic drift) in 2001, and together with her husband now owns and works in a restaurant in upstate New York. She has said that it was hearing ...”

“... from Beveridge, restates the old managerialist dream: ‘The object of government in peace and war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man’ – a message that lost its shine a while ago. The book has arrived too late for Ed Miliband, whose efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were ...”

“... as the political norm in Turkey. A more structural explanation is needed. During the Second World War, Inönü had steered his country in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering political affinity and passive assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be ...”

“... Williams was, indeed, a quite compulsive writer, almost a chronic writer. As a young working-class scholarship boy up at Cambridge, he seems to have decided, like not a few Welshmen before and after him, that the way to storm this alien citadel was to overwhelm it with a tide of wordy socialism. As an undergraduate Communist, he wrote his first pamphlet ...”

“... Harrison’s ‘barbarian’ recital of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a Northern working-class accent that he called a halt after only four words:‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death …Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of thoseShakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!’As a plebeian scholarship boy at Leeds Grammar ...”

“... and that is not very much made up either. Then shouldn’t this be as impressive in its own way as War and Peace or that Anglo-Saxon chronicle so much beloved by Russians, The Forsyte Saga? Alas, no. Art does not work like that, even with a writer as talented, industrious and conscientious as Paul Scott. Art abhors a vacuum, and Scott’s sequence seems to be ...”

“... one and the chapter on the miners – are not biographical in emphasis at all?). The Second World War is often credited with generating the post-war Butskellite consensus, but Morgan argues here that the war’s role was to provide an opening for people who had developed their consensual ...”

“... of it, but he seemed to have some sort of Anglo-Irish background. Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was ...”

“... comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, David Cameron is often described as being ‘upper-middle-class’, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, and his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-great-grandfather, and ...”

“... genteel tradition: ‘Edith Wharton’s great subject should have been the biography of her own class, for her education and training had given her alone in her literary generation the best access to it. But the very significance of that education was her inability to transcend and use it.’ Dreiser escaped his limitations, used them in fact as his ...”

“... good available solutions. In trying to confront these two insurmountable problems, the governing class tied itself so repeatedly and inextricably in knots as to consign itself to the contempt of future generations.Foreign policy hasn’t often dominated British politics. It did, however, in the years after 1935, when the question arose as to how Britain ...”

“... Isaac Babel was a middle-class Jew from Odessa who rode to war with a Cossack regiment. This extraordinary conjunction occurred during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. It is not news, because the single work that made Babel a famous writer – the short story collection Red Cavalry – is based on his experiences that summer, when he turned 26, at the First Cavalry Army HQ in a Volhynian village ...”

“... be ever more historical.’ That was prescient: the 19th-century Weimar court and educated middle class devoted much energy to memorialising the town’s cultural heroes in museums, statues, and in Goethe’s case, the great Weimar Edition. Weimar was not alone in its myth-making, in the way it turned itself into a kind of museum during the historicising 19th ...”

“... with teachers. Slaughterhouse-Five, about the Allied bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, was a perfect book for impressionable readers ready to graduate from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: it was serious yet comic, historical yet quasi-science-fictional, complex in structure but straightforward in style. You could read it in a flash and ...”