“... their traducers – the Establishment in general and the Court in particular. Throughout the war, Bloch argues, Windsor only desired to serve his country: this was a magnanimous gesture made with all the sincerity of a loyal and royal citizen. But, he suggests, at a time when all men of talent and good will should have pulled together, and when the great ...”

“... journalism. He had known controversy before. His dispatches for the Times during the Spanish Civil War were mutilated by his editors, pilloried by his critics and celebrated by such admirers as Ernest Hemingway: ‘When the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened,’ Hemingway announced in 1938. But nothing ...”

“... by which the world’s contents are classified have not been completely established for the class of things that compose the collection, the arrangement of the things can represent an understanding of the world that is not yet conventional.’ That, you might say, is perfectly lucid, but you might say that only after you have read the sentence twice. I ...”

“... late 19th centuries in particular. There are many reasons. Cross-dressing draws on the erotics of war and military discipline, making a heady combination of female and military narcissism: there are many loving descriptions of the male uniform in the autobiographical accounts of female soldiers. At the same time, it relies on overt theatricality. It is no ...”

“... to an act of roadside desperation. Driving on the highway in America is like flying economy class: you take your own food or suffer the consequences. Fast food can easily stand for all that is wrong with America, but that is not the way John Jakle, a professor of geography, and Keith Sculle, a professor of history, see it. The trenchantly anti-ironic ...”

“... people’s personal lives. But these images are, I would suggest, largely the creation of middle-class ideology. Mr and Mrs Average do not lie awake worrying because British ‘possessions’ coloured in red are no longer boldly splashed across the map of the world. Nor do most of us feel strangled by restrictions on personal freedom, even if we sometimes ...”

“... for power, ingenuity and subtlety alike. The historic span of Paradise Postponed is that of post-war England, as witnessed chiefly by the family of a fashionable left-wing cleric named Simeon Simcox. The story looks back from his death in 1985 and, neatly and undemandingly, intertwines events of the past forty-odd years. This family saga side works ...”

“... ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised ...”

“... through the pages. Others may admire the young man’s assumption that conventional middle-class manners and pleasures are compatible with an uninterrupted dedication to the craft of music. Andrew Motion has said that what he wants from a biography is information about commonplace matters, such as haircuts, so he will approve the young Britten’s ...”

“... was the real capitalism, contributing to social inequality’ – but agriculture and class analysis are both wilfully absent here. Poiesis is a book about making things and selling them. Acton’s is a world in which production, commerce and retail were king; everyone participated in a market economy governed by rational invisible laws, with ...”

“... recites these lines, which he had learned by heart in grade school during the Second World War, as a way of enduring compulsory chapel at the small Ohio college where he had fled from a humbler establishment in his home town, Newark, New Jersey. As an atheistic Jew and disciple of Bertrand Russell, studying in what he had understood to be a secular ...”

“... who pick their way across a new land, and like the ‘gleaners’ Youn keeps on invoking: second-class citizens, followers, like Ruth behind Boaz, or the gleaners in Millet’s painting, surviving on what the prosperous discard. The gleaners and the sandpipers in turn resemble the caterpillars raised by the poet’s young son – growing, climbing and ...”

“... addressed to Brenan, it may at first seem to embrace those who live by their pen, but questions of class are never far away in Pritchett’s understanding of his own trajectory, suggesting that the pronoun mainly picks out those who have made their own way in the world without the leg-up which in one form or another the comfortable classes provide for their ...”

“... credit. At first sight there seems to be an overwhelming partiality for American work in the post-war period, but more critical reflection disposes of my insular prejudice. The transition from Europe, pre-1939, to the United States, post-1945, is truly astonishing. Nazi policies must take considerable responsibility for the Jewish influx and its vitalising of ...”

“... was 23. All right, that’s not so difficult. Twenty-five years before that the date was 1945: the war had just ended, and I was two years short of being born. Twenty-five years from now it will be 2020 and I’ll be 73 (maybe). Which is ridiculous – these are altogether different sorts of 25 years, surely? Why didn’t anyone tell us about time passing, the ...”