“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by her persona, depends on her name and her media savvy. BSW claims to have an explicitly working-class agenda, from tighter migration restrictions and anti-woke measures to a fuzzy plan for peace in Ukraine and a call to end weapons shipments to Israel. More accurately, the party addresses the concerns of the petite bourgeoisie. When I met Wagenknecht in her ...”

“... or Vladimir Putin arrested if they came to New York, in compliance with international warrants for war crimes. Mamdani’s overtures to Jewish organisations haven’t stopped the New York Post and other entities on the right from smearing him as an antisemite. A Republican city councilwoman, Vickie Paladino, has called for Mamdani’s deportation, on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”