“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hereditarian thesis from the environmentalist A.H. Halsey. This Burt published in early 1959 as ‘Class Differences in Intelligence I: A Reply to Miss Conway’. Immediately following Halsey’s four-page paper, he printed ‘Class Differences in Intelligence II: A Reply to Dr Halsey’ – a ten-page rejoinder ostensibly ...”

“... many of the long-term shifts in British society have been accelerating: from the manual working-class to the middle class; from manufacturing industry to service industries; from inner cities to suburbia; from the Northern provinces to the South. And in the process the two nations have begun to resurface in the shape of a ...”

“... is called with inaccurate cosiness’ – is calmly presented to the reader as a typical middle-class hippy of those years: irresponsible, self-indulgent, dishonest and not very bright; yet at the same time we are not openly invited to shake our fists or hiss. Compare Dickens’s treatment of Mrs Jelly-by in Bleak House. As high-minded neglecters of their ...”

“... words of Kenko Yoshida (1282-1350) on a master tree-climber: ‘This man belonged to the lowest class, but his words were in perfect accord with the precepts of the sages.’ The belief that universal truth may ultimately be attained through concentrated specialisation is encouraging and positive: no wonder many a Japanese mother today, fed up with a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... Rome was the model of rational and historical perfection, and an aristocracy, or at least an upper class, worthy of the name should live up to it. His satires batten on the discrepancy; but he has no real interest in the individuals who actually have to make up such a society, even at the highest level. It is here that his achievement as a novelist is so ...”

“... chronicles the nascent television industry. The book’s hero, Tom Rath, has returned from the war and is in the process of ‘heroically reconverting’ to civilian life as he soldiers through a drab and unsparingly depicted corporate landscape in order to provide honourably for wife and family. Flash forward fifty years to microserfs, and the scene is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”