“... my father’s, Mrs Hereward Wake, said she also stole furniture from her.   During the 1914-18 war, she wrote to my father asking him not to allow my brother Sacheverell (then a schoolboy) to come to London to see my brother Osbert (who was in the Grenadiers) when he came on leave from the front after one of the most appalling battles of the ...”

“... gilt salon to hear Alex Salmond and your man present the SNP – though Scotland does seem the one class act in an election as depressingly hidebound as it is important. Think of those scores of German Literatur-wissenschaftler confronting the present cultural scene: Alasdair Gray juggling with realism and fantasy, Gait’s ‘theoretical histories’ and ...”

“... sacred space. The promise to sponsor ‘the greatest peacetime event since the Second World War’ brought the Olympics to Atlanta. Using his skills as a real-estate lawyer, Billy Payne conjured away the climate (hot and humid); the transportation problems (the decaying, underfunded infrastructure of a sprawling suburban metropolitan area that had never ...”

“... the long 18th century emphasises the transformation of Hanoverian England – an imperial state at war for much of the period – as the fiscal and military demands of the country’s foreign policy wrought a domestic revolution in finance and banking, invigorated Parliament as public consent was required for increasing levels of tax revenue, and obliged the ...”

“... battlefield no history book can compete with, but this isn’t because of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the ...”

“... He was a musician who called himself Edmund Crispin when writing detective stories. The upper-class detective, necessary to the genre in those days, was Gervase Fen, a professor of English at Oxford. The novels were popular; I suppose I enjoyed them too, but I’ve just tried rereading one and wonder how this could have been. It is irredeemably ...”

“... to where Harrods now stands. He was duly bankrupted in the slump that followed the end of the war in 1815. The class of gentry that had £400 to £600 a year, the class of the Austen women, is said to have been the hardest hit, their ‘competence’ – based on a 5 per cent return ...”

“... as they got older because direct taxation was low (income tax peaked at 10 per cent during the war with France, and was abolished in 1816), inflation dropped below zero with the return of peace, and investment was easy, safe and lucrative. Government stock (‘consols’), Bank of England stock and East India stock were all offering a better return than ...”

“... white-looking; Shan, Guna and Rajan in the kitchen are Sri Lankan Tamils, refugees from the civil war working illegally while they wait for their asylum applications to be processed. Behind the bar, a ‘dark portal’ leads up to the first-floor flat where the chefs ‘seal themselves off’ to sleep every night after their shifts; in emergencies, when the ...”

“... the leading candidate. This is his fourth presidential run. In 2005 he courted the urban middle-class liberal vote, running around the city wearing Ray-Bans and posing with his plane. Nobody was persuaded. Today that social stratum is completely alienated from politics and Qalibaf long ago dropped the pretence of being interested in their vote.There is one ...”

“... Brew (1976), or from the epically painful In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) to the working-class soap Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1973) and the TV variety show Like a Bird on a Wire (1975). It is an oeuvre so vast that Penman calls it ‘an entire town, region, conurbation, country; die Fassbinderrepublik’. Its revolving cast of actors and the ...”

“... J.-B. Pontalis is a Parisian intellectual de pur sang. Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, he was brought up in Neuilly, and, as a child, spent long summers at a family house in Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. He studied philosophy under Sartre, and taught it for some years. He entered psychoanalysis under the aegis of Lacan, and having weaned himself from that unfortunate affiliation, is now one of the leading figures in the French psychoanalytic world ...”

“... stoically accept their lot, and find their truth in Robert Westall’s novels of the Second World War. Alison Lurie, claiming that the best children’s books are ‘on the subversive side’, has said that ‘most of the lasting works of juvenile literature express feelings not generally approved of or even recognised by grownups.’ That applies to ...”

“... campaign, but disclosed the origins of just 18 per cent of the donations that made up their war chest because sums below €5,000 do not have to be declared. The connection between big business and the government obviously has implications for public policy. During the Lisbon campaign, for example, Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU, said it ...”

“... Many of these women were servants; their taste for foreign fashions was seen as an affront to class distinctions as well as to national self-sufficiency. Although the import and sale of Indian cotton was banned in Britain and France for much of the 18th century, it continued to be shipped via Britain to Africa, where some of it was bartered for ...”