“... of the Victorian reform movements, eugenics? Were not its successive leaders drawn from the same class of British society, with its capacity to disguise self-interest behind proposals for social reform, to salve its social conscience by promoting good causes at other people’s expense? In Statistics in Britain D.A. MacKenzie has harnessed this theory to ...”

“... prosperous and established writers of serial fiction and ‘think pieces’ for middle-class magazines and reviews lay the large underclass of book-writers who are the subject of Nigel Cross’s illuminating study. Hovering perilously between the lower slopes of Parnassus and the surrounding flat with its quicksands, they were the victims of the ...”

“... the age. The travellers to Camelot, if they weren’t all actual members of the hereditary ruling class, had strong social and cultural ties with it and participated in its anxieties. As the natural heirs of chivalry, they would have been perverse indeed if they had not been beguiled by it. An idealism with a venerable pedigree was much to be preferred to a ...”

“... the ‘Marxist heresy’, the ‘infamous Clause Four’ (pointedly misquoted), ‘prejudiced class warriors’, ‘the over-mighty state’ and ‘troublemakers and extremist groups’. At times, the text almost takes on the character of a group therapy session, where a couple of reactionary old codgers who have had to sit tight-lipped through years of ...”

“... in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago. She married and divorced Howard Howland, a Wasp whose family came over on the Mayflower, leaving her a single mother to two boys; she was taken up by Saul Bellow, who became her mentor and sometime lover. Her first story came out ...”

“... de Poire to Diaghilev in Misia’s apartment, a friend burst in to say that Austria has declared war on Serbia. Gold and Fizdale tell a sombre version of the famous ambulance expedition to the Front, with Misia in command and Cocteau featuring as mascot. Frederick Brown’s account is more savage. Probably our authors are closer to the truth about this ...”

“... time, however, its social composition differed. Alienated by the mensalão, much of the middle-class electorate that had rallied to Lula in 2002 deserted him, while the poor and the elderly voted for him in greater numbers than ever before. His campaign, too, struck a different note. Four years earlier, when its aim had been to reassure doubtful ...”

“... Ernaux was born. Annie was sent to a private Catholic school, where she was often top of the class. She went to train as a teacher in Rouen, abandoning her studies when she realised her heart wasn’t in it. She then spent six months as an au pair in Finchley, before heading to Bordeaux to work on a PhD on Marivaux. She had an abortion when she was a ...”

“... was knighted by Queen Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is ...”

“... on too, as an alias to practise medicine under, up to, during and even after the Second World War. Céline made money and leisure for himself from his books but he never let doctoring altogether go. His surgery hours were the writer’s field-work, because then he could be the licensed voyeur of the hurts and privations of his (working-...”

“... he was also said to have ignored the plight of the poor when he rebuilt Beirut after the civil war. For most of his political career Hariri backed the Syrians but last year began moving slowly and cautiously towards the opposition. It is said that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, told him last August that ‘if you and Chirac want me out of ...”

“... Angeles Times from the beleaguered Armenian enclave headlined ‘A New Weapon Complicates an Old War in Nagorno-Karabakh’ featured interviews with civilians terrified by the buzz of drone engines presaging a hail of high-explosive bombs and rockets. Six months ago, Turkey’s deployment of its homegrown drones to ward off an Assad government offensive in ...”

“... among his three cardinal virtues, along with theft and betrayal. At a time when most middle-class gay writers were projecting their sexual orientation on fictional characters and endorsing the idea that homosexuality is an illness that calls for condolences, Genet was laying claim to his own homosexuality and was showing it to be a sin and a crime, a ...”

“... top-grade pills, valued at £190 million. By this time rumours abounded on all sides in the Syrian war that Captagon was fuelling a grim cult of battlefield atrocities. An investigation by Vanity Fair in France last April uncovered a trail of testimonies and video images of pumped-up soldiers and ‘zombies roaming, all smiles, across fields of ruins and ...”

“... Setting his face against the IMF and World Bank, Erwin argued that the SACP, ‘representing class interests on the basis of socialist theory’, should struggle for a Reconstruction Accord, enshrining a radical process of redistribution which ‘must go beyond’ such timid ideas as wealth taxes, progressive taxation and sweeping land reform to more ...”