“... 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 ...”

“... and record all the necessary authenticating detail of her settings: Cambridge before the Great War, Germany in the time of Goethe and Novalis, Pre-Revolutionary Moscow. The achievements of the novelist betoken a wonderfully economical habit, but perhaps the trick is more difficult to bring off in the even more limited space of the short story; and it is ...”

“... which is that its author does not realise he is in a tragedy at all. In 1999, at the time of the war in Kosovo, Paul was taken to hospital with what turned out to be an aortic aneurysm; he very nearly died, and after several weeks in a coma he was troubled by hallucinations. What brought him to his senses, he wrote in an LRB Diary the same year, was ‘that ...”

“... did or didn’t know anything about warfare and had or hadn’t chosen the wrong time to enter the war on Germany’s side. In the valley of the valets, overhearing often cedes very quickly to advising, and by the end of Linge’s memoirs it becomes clear the valet was actually in charge of the Third Reich.* The future under Linge would be a place of ...”

“... and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World ...”

“... is either knit together into a single pattern or fragmented into sub-sets of rival fan groups at war with one another and also with the over-arching wider society. This is not, one would suppose, a particularly original position, but the Elias/Dunning ‘figurational’ schema differs from Malinowski’s ‘institutional’ approach in that it emphasises ...”

“... a volumetric flask. That’s what a boiling flask is for. Did you learn nothing from my chemistry class? JESSE: No. You flunked me. Remember? Prick. By season five, despite Breaking Bad’s addictive qualities, the comedy’s thinning out, and the ending of one particular episode is so shocking and distressing that it was weeks before I could bring myself to ...”

“... liked to say, ‘and both of them are gone: San Francisco and Shanghai. They had intrigue and class. They were international and everyone dressed right.’ Dressing right was big with Bruno. He always wore a jacket, specially made to accommodate his girth, a tie and monogrammed shirt, also custom-made, with cufflinks. He wanted his bar to have ...”

“... a prideful independence in public affairs, as if he were the last noble soul in a governing class captured by ambition and greed. Many contemporaries suspected him of reactionary conservatism, or at least nostalgia for the Ancien Régime – a charge Tocqueville always denied. But some of his more recent defenders, among them the historian Olivier Zunz ...”

“... it made sure an invitation was sent. He was at the Western Front during the First World War, in Manhattan in the Jazz Age, on the picket-line during the Great Depression, in the Soviet Union just before the news of Stalin’s butchery started to become widely known. Although his relations with the Zeitgeist soured in the second half of his ...”

“... was one of many traits his son inherited. Yeats’s school record would have dismayed most middle-class parents – in a class of 13 boys he was 12th in classics, 12th in modern languages, and 13th in maths and English. So for academic as well as financial reasons there was no hope of his following the family tradition and ...”

“... never brigaded, by Surrealism, he came to occupy a position apart in the literary scene after the war, shunning its conventions and connections. A teacher for 35 years in secondary schools, all his work – which crossed many genres – was produced by a small editor, antithesis of the publishing establishment in Paris. In 1951 he refused the Goncourt Prize ...”

“... I acquired an absurdly fearsome reputation among some of the toughest drinking men of working-class London, though of course I, as messenger, was only the medium through which deference was shown to Mollie, whose hospitality towards assorted wandering Irish, British and Polish souls was legendary. The parties would often go on until the small ...”

“... of arthritis in my ankle, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do.7 January, Yorkshire. On the war memorial at Malham is the inscription:Live thou for EnglandWe for England diedI don’t know if this is a quotation, or an injunction that was, as it were, custom-made, but I find it – if only slightly – misplaced, and I don’t wholly concur, as the ...”