“... quiet, disenchanted treatment suggests a deeply alternative reading. Although from quite distinct class and religious backgrounds, both Marx and Engels were Rhinelanders – that is, natives of a region where different cultural and linguistic communities had fused together. Inextricable cross-fertilisation of influences lay at the root of what became ...”

“... an unearned income, not to become dependent on expensive domestic aids, which I knew most working-class women survived without. If I now feel critical of those attitudes as romantic and unrealistic it is because they remind me of a politics envisaged almost entirely in terms of my own conscience and peace of mind, which failed to take me towards other ...”

“... legislation when he was Prime Minister of the Cape; and he was directly responsible for the Boer War and all its repercussions, thanks to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. It is harder to calculate the long-term effects of his actions on the Matabele tribe, and the results of his colonisation north of the Zambezi. It is perhaps sufficient to observe that he ...”

“... where historical drama presented mouth-watering images of an aristocratic or upper-middle-class past. But although Wright kept an eye on such things, his curiosity ranged far beyond the media. Having set off on a quest into the origins of the conservationist mentality, he traced it to a variety of sources both high and low, famous and obscure. He ...”

“... claim to be. Though stereotypes are sometimes purely fictional, they are not always so. The upper-class English are indeed for the most part more emotionally reserved than working-class Greeks or Italians, a fact which has more to do with their prep schools than their genes. Critics of stereotyping insist that the human ...”

“... was later to lose his fortune in the financial crisis that followed the end of the Napoleonic War, and the family suffered the humiliation of a downward social spiral, shifting from one down-at-heel abode to another. Eventually, Newman Senior was declared bankrupt and died in his prime of ‘what they used to call a broken heart’, as Cornwell puts it ...”

“... before rising to the rank of major in the Highland Light Infantry during the Second World War. He was also a pillar of the Kirk. A glowering – and sometimes snide – authoritarianism was second nature to Ross, who ran Scotland in the manner of a brusque, no-nonsense dominie. His ignorant charges included most Scottish Labour MPs, especially the new ...”

“... Egypt; by the end of the third book, the stage has expanded to encompass an intercivilisational war that spans not only the three-dimensional universe but other dimensions too.The grand scale of Cixin’s story is supported by an immense quantity of research. He graduated from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in 1988 and ...”

“... this process starts in a district it goes on until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.’ The change, she implies, is not desirable. The very people who lament the loss of ‘authenticity’, come on maudlin about ‘real people’ and censure gentrification ...”

“... and electrification of the pits in his home town of Eastwood on the eve of the First World War, but he suppressed all mention of the militant resistance that these measures met with. Far from being members of a servile and disciplined army of labour, the miners of Eastwood staged three strikes over the new machinery between 1907 and 1912. If we seek to ...”

“... a Moses espying the intellectual promised land, the other an alien standing outside the English class system. It is unfortunate that Cheyette’s analysis of Culture and Anarchy and the other relevant texts is briefer and more schematic than most of his later chapters. Unlike Trilling, Cheyette glosses over Arnold’s derivation of the Hebraism-Hellenism ...”

“... of us who found a foreign language irresistible when we were children. On behalf of this guilty class let me salute Alice Kaplan for what she has now done for us by publishing her very intelligent and unusual ‘memoir’. If there have been such accounts as this before, I’ve not come across them. Kaplan has set out to answer if she can the one ...”

“... he never seriously purported to be other than he was. He exhumed his Christian name in post-war politics and made it into a distinctive trademark, whereas to remain Peter would have left him swimming in a pool of Anthonys and Olivers and Harolds and Hughs. It was thought very funny at the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator hung the Foreign ...”

“... Property-owning and picaresque were once upon a time in opposition, but the new middle-class diaspora has changed all that. People want to put down roots where they wander, buy themselves a piece of the view and a share of the sky, a place of their own. Marvellous time. Wish I was here. We don’t simply holiday and go home, we dream in brick and stucco and terracotta ...”

“... which Kipling much admired, it is a tale about a virtuous spinster companion during the Great War, whose employer’s nephew in the RFC is killed on a training flight. Having brought him up, Mary is very devoted to him. Later a little girl in the village is horribly killed when a house collapses, perhaps as a result of a German bomb. Further upset, Mary ...”