“... was later reinforced by a phoney appeal to science. High profits at the cost of working-class poverty were supposed to prove the survival of the fittest. Intelligent Victorians could not swallow these half-baked faiths, but they feared democracy threatened their unearned incomes, so the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold hardly ever reflect ...”

“... he wrote, ‘you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body’; and he quoted Somerset Maugham: ‘I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does … The matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth, wealth or education.’Those words ring in my ears when I recall a ...”

“... of parody. There’s a clear division between goodies and baddies: the goodies are all working class and the baddies all went to public school. Fourpetal, the former employee of Lacebark, is an ex-public schoolboy who tells Raf that while he was working in financial PR he often bumped into people he’d been to school with. He becomes an ally of Raf and ...”

“... in the late 19th century than now; Britain was used to ruling other peoples, and had a special class of men trained up to do just that. Present-day America has not, and this may account for some of the undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq. Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, came from that class. With Lords Curzon and ...”

“... the Mughal emperor, the British went to great lengths to create an intricate taxonomy of caste, class and religion, a patchwork of conflicting interests which apparently could be held together only by the higher logic of imperialism. The British insisted almost hysterically on the hostility between Hindus and Muslims, and by the time decolonisation ...”

“... refusal to confront the Armenian genocide and the massacres carried out by the army in its dirty war with Kurdish separatists. Seven months later, he was charged with ‘insulting Turkishness’, which carries a sentence of up to three years in jail; his books were burned along with the Kurdish flag at nationalist rallies and he was pelted with eggs outside ...”

“... of his crimes came from the interviews that he gave, while still free in Argentina, to a Dutch war criminal and Holocaust denier called Willem Sassen. Sassen wanted to minimise the numbers deported to the camps; Eichmann, unclear about his interlocutor’s agenda and always ready to brag, kept arguing in the opposite direction.)His capture, trial and ...”

“... into the expanding settlements of the West and the South and into the armies of the Civil War. It starts with the transformation of the mails, whose main purpose for decades had been to circulate print, into a system for transmitting letters. Stamp prices were lowered, post offices were built, mailboxes were attached to lamp posts and home delivery ...”

“... there are problems of definition: how big can a little magazine get before it outgrows its weight class? And how, for that matter, is size to be measured? By circulation? Price? Frequency? Rates of payment to contributors? Some average measurement of all of the above? ‘The origins of the small review are lost in obscurity,’ Ezra Pound wrote in his 1930 ...”

“... of Downton it is supposed to be about 1920 and she is going on eighty. Nobody born in 1840, in any class, would have heard the word before they reached middle age. In 1879 a correspondent to Notes and Queries wondered if it was a dialect term. In Staffordshire, he explained, ‘if a person leaves home … on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of ...”

“... of angry Reagan voters, evangelical suburbanites and the elusive ‘Nascar dads’ of the working class who thrilled to the manly nationalism of the hard right. Goldwater was an unlikely revolutionary and his home state an unlikely breeding ground for revolution. One of the last states admitted to the Union (in 1912), Arizona was the closest thing to a ...”

“... was at home with his mother sorting through articles on 18th-century engravers. The ensuing civil war had a more decisive effect. It brought the Eisenstein family romance nicely to the boil. His father joined the White Army, he the Red. One thing not in short supply in the Red Army was theatre troupes (more than two thousand of them by 1920). Eisenstein had a ...”

“... reasons, food shortages and increasing debility and weariness – unlikeliness of us winning the war etc. etc.’When the news came through of Norton’s death, Elisabeth’s parents, who were in Ankara, sent a telegram to her younger sister Alethea, who was travelling with friends in India. It read: NORTON DIED SUDDENLY BURIAL MEREVALE DO NOT CHANGE ...”

“... exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees and prisoners’. This was the narrative reported by most journalists, who ignored the statement from the vice president’s office claiming that he and ...”

“... Empire’s governing elite. Capturing the gloom that had been a frequent mood among the senatorial class since the days of the republic, he looked back on his own lifetime, and described the transition after 180 ce from the rule of competent and sane Antonine emperors to that of a bunch of imperial lunatics, chancers and tyrants. It was a precipitous descent ...”