“... election will be a battle between rival sects of the same capitalist faith rather than the grand war of competing ideologies that we have seen in the past. The Tories are of course the party of sleazeocracy, and in their willingness to be bought there is at present a genuine moral difference between the two sects. How much this is specific to the Tories and ...”

“... victory in 1906 and to carry a series of important social reforms in the years preceding the Great War. But, in Parry’s eyes, the ‘gaggle of outsiders’ who ran the parliamentary party during the Edwardian decade had largely forfeited their right to be known as ‘Liberals’. Asquith himself may well have inherited his leadership style from the Whig ...”

“... party with modest redistributive aims. Its radicalism was not directed towards the working class, whose actual existence was beginning to be doubted by sophisticated progressive opinion, influenced by theories of embourgeoisement and by rapidly increasing real wages. Crosland had hoped for a classless society, which seemed an attainable aim – through ...”

“... of Burke and Adam Smith – but because of what has happened in the world since the Second World War. The various changes which have undermined the presuppositions of traditional socialism are by now familiar enough. But their cumulative effect has taken time to sink in. The failure of existing socialist societies to implement the traditional socialist ...”

“... can be found in his brief sketches of the gradients of Lyon, the long streets of Roubaix, middle-class houses in Touraine or the quality of light in the Ile de France. He can evoke, too, the inter-war years on the other side of the Channel, the ‘Bloomsbury boarding-houses kept by declining ladies, the stale smell of ...”

“... Cambridge colleges. The idea, spread by some, that Lord Butler (as he now is) was more ‘middle-class’, and therefore more acceptable to the rank and file of the Conservative Party, than Mr Macmillan with his alleged ‘grouse-moor image’ is rubbish. The difference between Marlborough and Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most ...”

“... birth, of the sanctity of marriage. Menocchio was hostile to Latin as the language of a privileged class, and thought that ‘Holy Scripture has been invented to deceive man.’ The Apocryphal gospels were no less authoritative. He rejected images, ceremonies, the sacraments, saints’ days, the power, wealth and economic oppressiveness of the Church, and a ...”

“... invisible and more cranky with each book he published after the USA trilogy. Of the stars of the class of 1918, only William Faulkner survived gracefully, protected by a thick cloak of obscurity until the very end. The class of ’45, those writers who attained majority, or at least draft age, during the Second World ...”

“... Such contradictions give Rand her field for cultural interpretation, covering sexuality, class and ethnicity, as well as problems of intention and reception. She makes, to say the least, a thorough job of it, most absorbingly so in the first section about the doll’s own deep history, which is veiled by conflicting myths of origin. In the ...”

“... which, whatever their long-term drawbacks, permitted quick discharges. At the end of World War Two, the farm and gardens were closed and most of the land sold off to build the North Circular Road. By the 1960s, with the development of effective anti-psychotic drugs, the writing was on the wall. In an age increasingly hostile to ...”

“... of France in the early 1980s, they could never get into power, given the constraints of the Cold War? In the past, parties offered both an identity and a set of alternatives, but voters didn’t really exercise choice because their identity determined the way they voted. Parties might have been representative, but they weren’t necessarily responsive; as ...”

“... of international recognition. Not long after, Engels would write The Condition of the Working Class in England and the subject would also be uppermost in Marx’s mind when he was writing Das Kapital. But Tocqueville was right to diagnose a British fixation. If the Victorian poor had been less poor, English literature would be a lot less rich, British ...”

“... out in the sun. I suspect you have a real writing talent.’ Another of White’s obsessions is class, from the ‘rumpled’ prep school sons of Detroit auto executives to the gentility of the Upper East Side, where voices vibrate with accents ‘drilled in’ by private schools like Brearley and eyes open wide to reveal ‘their fine Chippendale ...”

“... one in 1942; but it just missed its moment, being published soon after Cripps was ejected from the War Cabinet. Eric Estorick, a strong admirer, wrote two, the second of which (published in 1949) was widely read. Both Strauss and Estorick were, as Clarke puts it, ‘partisan’ and made use of ‘selective access’ to Cripps’s private papers. His ...”

“... needs, demands and ambitions were shared to some degree by many American women of her class and time, and were being analysed by feminists during the last years of her life. I am not, of course, suggesting that feminism could have ‘saved’ Diane Arbus – simply that it offers a political framework in which her life looks less randomly ...”