“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... written for. ‘Greatness isn’t impossible, but greatness without the sanction of the dominant class is impossible.’ Given the nature of the dominant class in Italy throughout Pavese’s life, this was not an encouraging prospect. It thus became harder and harder to enjoy aspiring and achieving, desire and ...”

“... His sister hadn’t seen him for seven years. She had been trapped in Kiev during the war that followed the Russian Revolution. Eventually, in 1921, she managed to escape with her elderly mother and two small children and made her way to Vienna. When we entered his room Vaslav was sitting in an armchair; he did not get up to greet us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and suffers from schizophrenia and night terrors. Both women have PTSD, a legacy of the Vietnam War. Rose and Little Dog are themselves a legacy of the war, since his maternal grandfather was an American soldier. Much of the book is taken up with describing the experiences of Little Dog’s family in Vietnam before his ...”

“... more from the police and the lawyers than most murders’. This is a book about morality and class, about the uses and abuses of literacy and about the tremendous dislocations in British society after the First World War, which extended far beyond those who had suffered the direct trauma of battle. Hilliard uses these ...”

“... colonialism. The land expropriation and forced migration suffered by Kosovo Albanians in the inter-war years encouraged their collaboration with Fascist states which appeared to offer them a better deal. The end of World War Two ushered in twenty years of anti-Albanian repression at the hands of Tito’s Minister of the ...”

“... a think tank called National Security Action, which advocated a ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ whose focus would be ‘Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China’, that is, the abandonment of Bush’s war on terror and ramping up of Trump’s reindustrialisation and trade ...”