“... and primary momentum, lay. From the beginning, Osmanli rulers had drawn their legitimacy from holy war – gaza – on the frontiers of Christendom. The subjugated regions of Europe formed the richest, most populous and politically prized zones of the empire, and the theatre of the overwhelming majority of its military campaigns, as successive sultans set out ...”

“... a laughing, embarrassed excitement. Relief, maybe, that the death had no obvious connection to the war. The lack of bloodstains, rubble, shrapnel or broken glass seemed quaint. And relief, perhaps, that it was someone else, putting a shiver of triumph in your own working limbs and heartbeat. The scene was an enactment of the world vis-à-vis Ukraine: we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Anita Brookner. But that’s about it. Among those who don’t travel on the Tube, the upper-class and the upper-middle-class read – largely books about themselves, of which there have always been plenty. People connected with the universities also read – some of them even read outside their own disciplines. But by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... males.Some historians believe the keju represented a commitment to excellence among the ruling class; others argue that by uplifting commoners, it helped Chinese emperors to weaken their aristocratic rivals. It was never without its critics, and became a stimulus of dynastic crisis at several points during the 1300 years of its ...”

“... 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 ...”