“... Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne Reid ...”

“... rules were merely custom and practice, retained through the fragile consent of the old political class. At a full council meeting in September, he openly pressured the local authority over his business interests, despite being warned that it was a conflict of interest. The exchange happened in public view, in front of the entire council; the video’s on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... where everyone is pulled into a single political society.’ Forty of those years were spent at war, but today Angola is a model of fast-track 21st-century African development, with GDP growth rates comparable to India’s, at least until the recent fall in oil prices. The ruling Marxist party, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola ...”

“... what they have largely become. Detail is for instance death to the American tongue.’ Manner and class, bedevilling our screens with Evelyn Waugh revisions and soapy TV scrapings from the heritage catalogue (country houses, clothes that fit too well), is no part of Raworth’s remit. He’s all detail, all darting quickness. Drainpipe trousers, winklepickers ...”

“... white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established templates for Great Artists ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after a £100,000 investment, requires a certain amount of polyfilla prose.) Mr Nice, the working-class boyo, penetrated the middle classes, beginning with the ‘rivetingly glamorous Lynn Barber’, a future journalist who never forgot the experience. Onward and upward: bent aristos, dopers with great collections of blues records. A brief affair with 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 ...”

“... back to the 1790s in such works as the Joseph and Leopold Cantatas, as well as the Friedelberg war songs, yet in central works – Solomon cites the Third and Fifth Symphonies, Fidelio and the Incidental Music to Egmont – this aggressive, quasi-militaristic style ‘was sublimated into a subtle and profound form of expression’. It is not surprising ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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-...”