“... many ‘minority’ students as to make the term meaningless: this year, the college’s entering class of a thousand or so breaks down as 25 per cent Asian, 17 per cent Hispanic, 10 per cent African American, 1 per cent Native American. Should not the foundation course reflect – or at least gesture towards – the diverse cultural origins and gender mix of ...”

“... preoccupied Genovese in nearly all his writings about the American South, slavery, and issues of class and politics. The Southern Tradition does not chronicle the author’s earlier studies and their public reception as did Woodward’s Thinking Back, but as a personal testament it is comparable to that elegant intellectual memoir, offering a means for ...”

“... They have a great deal to do with the possibility of riots: there are not many riots in middle-class garden suburbs. Morris, while hesitant about making generalisations, offers a description of a hypothetical riot: ‘A disturbance could begin as a serious protest but easily transform into a rampage. A crowd would gather; someone would throw a rock through ...”

“... course of their profitable search of local records in Leicester, have established that his working-class mother did indeed care for him until her death when he was 11 years old. Whether the care was truly loving is a question on which the records are silent, but she could easily have disposed of Joseph to a showman or the charitable authorities long before ...”

“... It was the back of beyond: but the patterns of social life persisted. The Roman governing class wove a web of influence and patronage; and letter-writing was a main thread in it. (Later, at least, we find books of model letters for all social emergencies – how to congratulate an acquaintance on a large legacy, or commiserate with him on a small ...”

“... was when children’s books were in a doldrums that had lasted from just before the First World War till well after the Second. Though that forty-year gap was not entirely empty, it is odd to notice now how totally even its better books are ignored. All the books about children’s books reviewed here are worthy, honest and interesting. Two of them, The ...”

“... and later gave lessons. Semyon, a tough but witty son of a soldier killed in the Second World War, had ambitions of becoming an opera singer, but became a mechanical engineer instead. The anxious, fragile little Igor was the object of his parents’ devotion. At night, they hovered over him, holding his mouth open with a tablespoon to make sure he ...”

“... incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any more, critics often wail, as they hark back to a golden age of exquisite sentences and profound moral depths. There are no great novelists any more ...”

“... was considered. ‘We must get over the idea that every writer must be an artist of the first class,’ the director of the FWP, Henry G. Alsberg, said: I think we have invested art with this sort of sacrosanct, ivory-tower atmosphere too much. The craftsmen who worked on the cathedrals were anonymous . . . I think cheap books, less fuss about our sacred ...”

“... that it was already split. Indeed, if you swap red for Rebel grey, the map looks like the Civil War resumed and extended across the board, with an obvious geographic divide that reflects an awful racial divide. Very few regions with much urban density are coloured for Bush (except for Ohio, Georgia and his own Texas); most of the coasts are blue, and most ...”

“... lawyer violently opposed to Nkrumah, the man is ‘obviously a Girondin of the most property and class-conscious kind’, while a frustrated teacher near Kumasi is ‘like the young Russian intellectuals in the novels of Turgenev’. Thomas belonged to the Quaker intellectual aristocracy. His father was provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, his grandfather ...”

“... but their thinking was no less doctrinaire: law and policing were hammers of the poor, weapons of class oppression serving the privileged interests of landed capitalism. Such simplistic readings of the criminal justice system were decisively challenged a generation ago by the bold reformulations of E.P. Thompson and his co-workers. In a series of ...”

“... second with tropical nature. Ford lost both. The decisive engagement with the Brazilian working class began in the new dining-hall in Fordlandia on 22 December 1930. The spark that ignited the riot seemed trivial. At first, common labourers had sat at one end of the dining-hall, foremen and craftsmen at the other, and each group had been served by ...”

“... to relations between and within societies, to international politics as well as to national class struggle. Wherever they crop up, hegemons and their ideologues will do what they can to identify hegemony with legitimate authority: a social contract among equals in which leaders govern by consent and their followers give that consent in grateful return ...”

“... something was moving its slow thighs, something like individual vacations, something middle-class decadent like open marriage, whatever that was. He was afraid of conceptualising what he was afraid of.’ That last sentence is a knot of infelicities: the ugly gerund, the repetition of ‘afraid’, the terminal preposition. Its virtue is that the ...”