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“... socialists, in fact, they are wondering how to tackle the ‘post-ist’ age – post-Cold war, post-socialist, post-Keynesian, post-feminist, Post-Modernist. Besides, any attempt to recruit God on behalf of New Labour would encounter the opposition of those with Christian backgrounds who remain uncertain of New Labour’s merits, such as Michael ...”

“... idea of the Thirties, the afternoon men in their Soho clubs and hideouts, their lust for working-class boys, their not wonderfully well-informed Marxism, and their easy way of arranging matters to suit themselves, whether in the choice of wartime careers, say at Bletchley, or perhaps in some other establishment where scraps of secret could be salvaged to ...”

“... could be purchased more and more readily by more and more persons possessing money rather than class, the nobility could not uphold their image. Ceremonial and hierarchical display of gold brocade and velvet came to be seen as meretricious: the clothing of upstarts. ‘Luxury’ has always been a hot political issue; for Kuchta, the language of clothes is ...”

“... but Lolly Willowes, which got her off to such a good start, is about a downtrodden middle-class woman who escapes her male oppressors and becomes a witch. This reminds one of Keith Thomas’s observation that medieval women, if they wanted a hearing, had to become prophets (‘the best hope of gaining an ear for female utterances was to represent them ...”

“... in history as a perverse preoccupation with the mistakes of the past. History was for second-class minds; first-class minds could safely ignore it and get on with the job in hand. Such an attitude, however, could only survive so long as there existed a rough consensus as to what the job in hand was. In the Fifties, the ...”

“... The post-war saloon-bar modernisation programme began in the era of Macmillan and the Affluent Society. Like most such programmes in England, its main intention was to resist the modern: the character of a pub, or so the landlord would tirelessly reassure his regulars, was not going to be changed, just ‘brought out’, much as monosodium glutamate brings out the true flavour of food ...”

“... and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war. The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His literary friends and fans, too, were un-English – the Americans Eudora Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty ...”

“... characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes. Williams also noted the importance of the Imperial bureaucracy in this ...”

“... Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con ...”

“... is why the North fell so much further than was necessary. In the aftermath of the First World War, the economies of the South-East and the North were ‘roughly on level pegging’, contributing 35 and 30 per cent of GDP respectively; by the end of the 20th century, the figures were 40 and 21 per cent, with London gaining another 5 percentage points ...”

“... in property, but he also ran for Parliament in order to avoid being called up during the war, which he spent as a spiv, selling chocolate, benzedrine, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens on the black market. Eventually, he was briefly and ingloriously conscripted. Afterwards, he styled himself Colonel Cornwell, but would pretend to be embarrassed by ...”

“... when considered historically. It traditionally refers to the ownership of capital by a restricted class of entrepreneurs. What does the capitalist Britain of the second railway boom, where the ownership of wealth was concentrated entirely in the hands of individuals, have in common with a modern Britain where, despite Mrs Thatcher’s best efforts at ...”

“... commercial, ugly harbingers of an ugly future. He detected their handiwork in every war and panic, and studied them as barometers of social disintegration. Observing the Jews and the Moors in Spain gave him, he quipped, a more liberal view of the Inquisition. The presence of 450,000 Jews in New York City alone, ‘doing Kosher’, proved to him ...”