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“... landed what I imagine was a strongly contested organ scholarship at Magdalen. He was a working-class boy but there was no trace of it in his voice or indeed of any class at all, though the fact that his parents had kitted him out with three Christian names may indicate their ambitions for him. This was a time, with boys ...”

“... Du Bois and the novelist Pauline Hopkins, began documenting their own and others’ Revolutionary War pedigree. Jews also started to publish family histories, create archives and found organisations such as the 1934 Society of Americans of Jewish Descent. Two women, one Cherokee-Creek, the other Chippewa, founded the First Daughters of America in 1930. The ...”

“... its patriotic character, its past loyalty to the Kaiser and its deep attachment to the Kleinburger class and only when this failed choosing the option of emigration. Once across the Atlantic, young Kissinger avoided political anti-Nazi circles and only found a mentor in the shape of one Fritz Kraemer, a Spenglerian Prussian who flourished in the US Army ...”

“... This approach was a response to the fragmentation of empires that began after the First World War, and the popular demands for redistribution and self-determination that surged through the nation-states that took their place. When these demands impinged on the free trade order, neoliberals opposed them as a form of juridical trespass: imperium, the ...”

“... belonging to one or the other. In Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane, the daughter of a white working-class mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem society. In Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, also the product of an interracial relationship, passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives ...”

“... up his first cigarette, ‘is the great expectation and excitement felt by Palestinians before the war began. Many people here chose to believe all of Saddam’s promises.’ He draws mightily on the cigarette and exhales slowly. ‘So when the Allied air attacks began we were watching the TV, waiting to see how the Iraqis would respond. But during that first ...”

“... by period – wore the same clothes is to deny the realities of a society structured around class.’ Philip Wright proposes that special reception areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the ...”

“... here is well known. Lakatos had been active in the Communist resistance towards the end of the war. On the lam, he abandoned his Jewish name, but kept the ‘L’ so as not to waste his monogrammed handkerchiefs (Lakatos, which means ‘locksmith’, is a common enough lower-class Hungarian surname). He then joined the ...”

“... in the French language at the hands of a refugee Belgian countess. What is important about the war years is that there was no question of the princesses joining the Dutch, Danish and Norwegian royalties in Canada. ‘To the Queen of England,’ says Lady Longford, ‘all this was a non-question. The public never dreamt of their King and Queen leaving under ...”

“... of his private life, and admitted that much of his output probably was as vulgar as his inter-war critics had claimed. Percy Young believed that the man and his music were inseparable, and presented Elgar as a ‘two-worldly character’, torn between the private poet of Worcestershire (who wrote great music), and the public poseur of London (who did ...”

“... a not dissimilar feat with his account of his wartime film-making career. He was having a good war – as a motor-cycling instructor, and then as a gunnery officer guarding Churchill at Chequers, while back home the film-rights money was rolling in – when he got an order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol ...”

“... so at Oxford.’ These are British complexities. Oxford and Cambridge and the Welsh working class; mathematics, philosophy, science and complicated political tendencies; the meaning of ‘traitor’ or (in Welsh) bradwr: these are the dominant themes in Loyalties. With The Prague Orgy we are in a more literary world – a real world, I mean, in which ...”

“... about Turnbull’s own, far from happy childhood in an Anglo-Scots Presbyterian middle-class family and of life at Westminster School. We are expected to infer that the socialisation of the Mbuti child is consistently coherent, integrative, loving, inducive of co-operation, while that of the Western child is disjointed, inconsistent, imbued with ...”

“... sometimes ‘to an alarming degree’, with ‘what he chose to call the “English” class system’. (The knighted Lamb began to insist on being addressed as ‘Sir Larry’ in the office; it wasn’t long before he was replaced by the private-school educated, wannabe barrow-boy Kelvin MacKenzie.) Now that Murdoch has 131 other media enterprises ...”

“... are these? In what sense can such behaviour be termed normal? The damaged nature of so many upper-class Englishmen is surely structural rather than accidental. In Hogg’s case the death of his mother when he was 17 appears to have added considerably to the emotional damage. Utterly egocentric, he was an isolated figure, wanting love but unable to give ...”