“... have focused in a very precise way a number of possible attitudes which a great many middle-class intellectuals of the post-war period find useful for the purposes of self-definition.’ Yes, I would have been tempted to think Lodge was over-egging it too, if I’d happened to read his essay only a couple of months ...”

“... spirit. According to Bloemink, Stettheimer was a social documentarian whose work looks wryly at class, gender, religion and race in early 20th-century America. She makes a compelling case. Stettheimer was born in 1871 to German-Jewish parents who belonged to New York’s One Hundred Families. Her father disappeared when she was seven, but her mother’s ...”

“... was a joke. As a founding myth, the Russian Revolution was largely displaced by the Second World War, and the Brezhnev regime seemed more committed to gradualism than any Fabian. To be sure, in the postwar period the Baltic states and Eastern Europe received a Soviet-taught Short Course in revolution from above, featuring such prewar staples as ...”

“... of samizdat texts – caught almost everyone off guard. The Soviet authorities had assumed that class antagonism, the ultimate source of social and ideological deviance, had long since been eradicated. Western analysts, accustomed to regarding the Soviet Union as the archetypal totalitarian state, were similarly unprepared for public manifestations of ...”

“... adviser, Campbell was involved, among much else, in presenting the massaged facts that took us to war, and dealing with the press after the death of David Kelly. He was a gleeful fixer, bully and phrase-maker for a prime minister who had streamlined the Labour Party (as in discarded anything that smacked of socialism) until it was indistinguishable from the ...”

“... vein, he wages a personal crusade against cupressus leylandii. Prescott is nervous about going to war with the conifer, as he has 16 of them in his back garden. Mullin finally gets to pitch his bid for a ban to Blair, who turns out to have given the matter his personal attention. The PM worries how the offensive will play in the suburban heartlands where, as ...”

“... education he was described as fit only for day schools, and labelled, in what Carey calls middle-class slang, N.T.S. – ‘not top shelf’ – and Not Quite, meaning ‘not quite a gentleman’. He played his piano, too loudly in the opinion of some dons; he stole some books, ran up debts to the college, got a second-...”

“... too disturbing force, is just how compromised he was. He came from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family. He was born in 1886 near the Holloway Road, not far from where the Pooters famously resided. For part of his childhood the family lived in St Albans but Williams was always a great Londoner, a man as entranced by the city streets as Dickens or ...”

“... and in state institutions. ‘Racism is about Jubilee mugs and Rule Britannia and how we won the war,’ Widgery wrote. The problem is not just the new fascists from the old slime, a master race whose idea of heroism is ambushing single blacks in darkened streets. These private attacks whose intention, to cow and to brutalise, won’t work if the community ...”

“... Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art. Yet, as we might expect of this ‘father of ...”

“... widely and often, but his imagination was profoundly shaped by the places he visited, from the war-torn landscape of France to multicultural Navarre, from the slave markets of Genoa to the oppressive splendour of Milan. It is no accident that ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, the Canterbury Tales’s harrowing legend of an abused wife, takes place in ...”

“... a lesson. Godwin refused, so Edward called the Midland and Northern earls to back him up. Civil war was only prevented by the rank-and-file on both sides, who refused to fight other Englishmen over a quarrel among the elites.What sort of case can Licence make for his subject’s aims and abilities? It depends on what you want from a king. If you want the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Thanks to his father’s service in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War, Said was an American citizen, and if he was reinventing himself, well, that’s what immigrants did in the New World. The Egyptian literary theorist Ihab Hassan had shed his Arab identity when he moved to the US, and had never looked back.But something in ...”

“... Bruno Ahrends, like so many German-Jewish emigrés, was interned at the start of the Second World War as an ‘enemy alien’ – stuck for the duration in Douglas on the Isle of Man. There he created dream images straight out of the unbuilt projects of Weimar Berlin, monumental glass and concrete skyscrapers of the kind that would be realised only after the ...”