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“... Much or the last volume of Proust’s novel is devoted to life in Paris during the First World War. Proust, the least chauvinistic of writers, is nevertheless so moved by patriotic sentiment as to transgress the convention which keeps a fictional world separate from its author: In this book in which there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise ...”

“... began. In line with Mao’s desire to expose intellectuals to the conditions of the working class and peasants, he voluntarily spent four years in one of the poorest regions in Henan province with a group of idealistic students who wanted to combine a life of manual labour with self-directed study. In 1972, he moved with them to a factory and spent ten ...”

“... liberals both supported large-scale coal mining as the enabler of traditional, authentic, working-class communities, and abominated it as global warming’s lead culprit. Only an accident of history allowed these sentiments to be consecutive rather than concurrent. Liberals prize the authentically local, the person or product or way of being that is ...”

“... but one-tracked, and self-satisfied. It takes a traditional target, the bizarrerie of upper middle-class Victorian sexual behaviour, and blasts away at it with satirical vigour and relish: but the more points are scored, the more pointless the exercise begins to seem. Here we have, on the sexual front, a priapic squire, his neurotic trapped wife and swarms of ...”

“... time-span is an extended 19th century, from the Fall of the Bastille to the First World War. Some myths invoked in Romantic writing, like Faust and Prometheus, have remoter origins than the Frankenstein fable. Other Gothic novels carried on, Baldick says, ‘safely retrospective flirtations with feudal and Papal power’. But Mary Shelley’s novel ...”

“... of the warrior caste, one rung below the Brahmins), he had raised himself to the middle-class through education. He and his family were mobile, not so much upwardly, because that is not the Indian way, but forwardly into a Westernised way of life. They sat on the symbolic ledge of the title between the two streams of tradition and progress, one slow ...”

“... Nobody could accuse him of not knowing and understanding women, as he accused Dickens. (In his class-conscious way, he is scornful of Dickens’s early lack of experience of refined women: ‘the damsels of Dingley Dell were probably as like ladies as anything he had seen.’) But what are the readers to make of, say, Amy Reardon, the heroine or ...”

“... were Robert Blatchford’s Clarion and A.R. Orage’s New Age. The Clarion’s pitch was working-class and almost aggressively non-intellectual – entirely unlike anything Shaw or the Webbs might wish to emulate. If the early Statesman had a model, it was the Nation, but it was the vexing celebrity of the New Age that convinced the Webbs that they could ...”

“... the quality of education which our children receive and hypostatises malign aspects of the British class structure. Walden estimates (the source of his information is uncited in the interest of keeping his book ‘jargon-free’) that 7 per cent of the school population is in the private sector. This tiny cohort attracts a per capita investment three times ...”

“... wonders how he can and what he will make of such a circle. How can he, born towards the end of the war, and living in a genteel villa in the outskirts of Liverpool, have a clue? We see this talented young fellow betwixt and between, indulging aspirations that would seem unexceptionable to his teachers, but, under practised scrutiny, quite ...”

“... Richard Lenoir and the canal Saint-Martin were made in part to reduce the scope for working-class manoeuvre. On the other hand, where questions of law and order were concerned, he tended more to a consequentialist than an intentionalist view. In respect of the extensions to the rue de Rivoli, he claimed that while its ‘straight line made it ...”

“... could offer ways of attracting attention. In my second year at primary school, for instance, the class was doing a project called Home and Shopping. The teacher had us all in a semi-circle and she placed a cake on a table. The cake was very pink and very glossy with a large cherry. Later, Mrs Nugent said I had been like a sleepwalker. She said I stood up ...”

“... who would have stepped aside for me if they had seen me in my fine clothes’. For Manon, a middle-class girl who a few years later would become known as Madame Roland, the politically active wife of a minister in the French Revolutionary Government, dressing down was a small but liberating gesture of rebellion. It freed her from both the obligations and the ...”

“... micro-neuro-surgery. None of this means that de Michelis was the worst specimen of that political class which is now, in its entirety, headed for oblivion, if not prison. On the contrary, he was one of the very best. Not merely cunning in the manner of all successful politicians, not merely clever as better politicians are, not merely highly intelligent, but ...”

“... paralysis. In Ceylon, the introduction of new taxes to cut costs without burdening British middle-class taxpayers triggered the emergence of a protest movement that soon encompassed around sixty thousand men.The revolutions involved a panorama of charismatic actors, from Giuseppe Garibaldi to the Romanian radical Ana Ipătescu, from the French socialist Louis ...”