“... that all men are created equal’ had experienced ‘a new birth of freedom’ in civil war. But with the defeat of Reconstruction a decade after Lincoln’s assassination, the 14th Amendment that was supposed to guarantee former slave ‘persons’ equality before the law came instead to insulate corporations, designated ‘artificial ...”

“... but not all English ones, which could use the same subtitle. The Waves, or The World of School, War and Peace, or The World of School, A Passage to India, or ... ? Brighton Rock? Le Grand Meaulnes? A clear case would be Brideshead Revisited, where Brideshead is obviously the name of the school itself. Even today, almost everyone has the school ...”

“... in 1903, a bizarre title for a girl of 19, and Beatified in 1909, when France was drifting towards war; drifting also into infidelity, which might be checked by a distinction conferred on the embodiment of French patriotism. Personified France and canonised Joan are both enigmatic figures. With Joan, Marina Warner has succeeded as well as anyone could in ...”

“... protest movement, now nearly three years old. In October 1934, in the build-up to the Civil War, a workers’ alliance of socialists, anarchists and communists overcame their usually fractious divisions to oppose the entry of three members of the quasi-fascist CEDA into the government. Workers’ militias marched from the mining villages towards ...”

“... exactly with the long Edwardian age, remembered as a last idyllic summer before the Great War. Those years were in fact politically troubled and the weather not especially good but childhoods like hers gave substance to the myth. The early letters to her adored mother and other relatives are redolent of picnics and pinafores, nursery teas, ponies and ...”

“... the New York Review of Books). So we already know a lot about his growing up in a lower-middle-class family in an inner suburb of South-East London; about his inherited Catholicism and his struggles with it; about his time studying English at University College London; about his long-lasting marriage to a fellow student and the fact that their third child ...”

“... that clothing is about the ‘social construction of identity’, and traces its economic, class and consumer implications in France, England and the United States over the past two centuries. Crane notes that before the Industrial Revolution, clothes were a valuable form of property, even a form of currency, that marked people’s precise position in ...”

“... Not that there’s a hint of that front of house, which is chaste, cheerful, middle-aged, middle-class and above all well-off, the car park full of four-wheel drives, Pioneers, Explorers, Conquerors, Marauders, all of which have blazed a fearless trail across rural Oxfordshire to this well-heeled location a mile or two from Chipping Norton where the best is ...”

“... father’s modest success as a lawyer had propelled the family out of poverty and into the middle class with its potent symbols: a car, a house in the suburbs, a television set, summer vacations at the seashore in Maine. These symbols were the same as those to which the Irish and the Italians and the Poles aspired: in one generation the fundamental shape of ...”

“... more easily with the Bosnian Serbs because they talk the common language of the officer class. General Mladic is nothing if not professional in the execution of his programme. The ragtag Bosnian Government Army is made up of ex-civilians and a few former Yugoslav National Army officers; its organisation is chaotic because it was formed at the moment ...”

“... woman’ while the father, Edward Albert Aldington, ‘was nearly a gentleman ... of much greater class than this very common, fat woman that he married’. Mother seems to have been the dominant partner, and her novels, ‘though hideously vulgar and illiterate’, as Richard wrote to his brother, ‘have much more vitality’ than those of his ...”

“... spot.Koltzov’s sitting-room was well and expensively furnished like any sitting-room in a first-class hotel in peacetime. It was lit by table lamps and warm. It did not look or feel like any other place I had been in Spain. Koltzov was a small thin man, with thick, well-cut, grey hair. He wore a dark, excellent suit. He had the kind of face that makes an ...”

“... evil, and – most important – a power of conveying youth and fashion which had the panache of class but none of its constraints and limitations. Jenny Pearl, the heroine of Carnival, had the same kind of fame as the post-war heroine of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, and Diana Cooper adopted her ...”

“... of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without ...”

“... Ralph sounds dry and affectless to begin with, but that’s just a symptom. He’s a Falklands War veteran who knows about traumatic stress disorder first-hand, having suppressed and later recovered his memories of escape from his burning ship. We first meet him when he attends his father’s funeral, and goes back to the old house ‘downstream of the ...”