“... as a party of the old establishment, vague nods to socialism, recent appeals to an urban middle class uninterested in radical politics, and the fact that it has become primarily a party of the Aegean coast. The predominantly Kurdish and more or less left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) had declined to join the Table of Six. But on 3 May the party’s ...”

“... have been freshly bombed. Billy Hardie was there at the end of fishing, a veteran of the Cod War and the glory days before. He was a trawler skipper then – he still captains a boat, now doing survey work – and he’s done well out of it, with a large, comfortable house in the suburbs. His wife has crowded fishing mementoes out of their living room ...”

“... The other main site of Sahlins’s historical investigations has been the ‘Polynesian War’ of 1843-55 between the Fijian kingdoms of sea-going Bau and land-lubbing Rewa, and this also provides the main ethnographic ingredients for Apologies to Thucydides. Fiji stars in two essays in Culture in Practice, strategically designed, it would ...”

“... with Pasquale Paoli’s design for a free Corsica in 1755, and carries on into the Seven Years’ War, which began in 1756 and whose global spread and fearsome costs (a single 74-gun ship required nearly three thousand mature oak trees and twenty miles of rope, and France built nearly fifty of them in the 1780s alone) changed empires and politics. The ...”

“... several other social institutions, notably kings’ academies, the workshops of artisans and upper-class salons. Women were involved in all of these. As the Renaissance courts of Europe turned from military to rhetorical skills, the superior power attributed to the mind seemed to justify women’s participation in intellectual culture. Aristocratic women ...”

“... we have learned how to do. What people find easy is, among other things, an indicator of social class. Steven Shapin’s previous book, A Social History of Truth, was about the sense in which – during the period covered by this new book, the late 16th and the 17th century – what people knew depended on who they knew. And who they knew, of course, and ...”

“... economic sovereign. The trouble, of course, is that no such sovereign is in sight. After the war, when Marshall Aid primed the pump of Western Europe’s economic recovery and set the long boom of the next quarter of a century in motion, the United States was so much stronger than anyone else that she could assume the burdens of sovereignty herself, at ...”

“... In February 1967, a band of 15 Cubans, led by Castro’s deputy, Che Guevara, himself a middle-class Argentinian, was joined by 12 Bolivians to form the foco that was to trigger off the Bolivian revolution. Their numbers dwindled almost at once. Debray, who joined them in April, ostensibly as an observer, was captured within weeks, tried and condemned to ...”

“... His talents were directed to interior decoration and the design of furniture. It was not until the war years, when he was found unfit for service because he suffered from asthma, that he began to paint in earnest. He proved his aptitude with appalling authority. By the late Forties, he had made himself one of the masters of his generation and a figure of ...”

“... see the odd white beggar here and there in the street. In general, the lot of the poor whites, the class that originally propelled Afrikaner nationalism to power, has not been so bad since the Thirties. On top of that, inflation is 16 per cent and, because of the drought and some profiteering, food price inflation is around 30 per cent, though for ...”

“... and deploy the public as a defence against the private? What are the anxieties that afflict middle-class intellectuals whenever someone delves into the personality of a national hero? Are they afraid that their own inner lives and the ambivalences they live with might be exposed? Do the carefully crafted public selves they erect for their heroes hide deeper ...”

“... to read. There is a willingness to collaborate, for the moment at least, despite the boundaries of class and occupation. But the facial expressions are too varied and the members of the crowd too embroiled in local transactions to suggest a collective emotion. The image gives us no reason to think that when the sun rises on a new day, these people will still ...”

“... Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian army officers who served with him in the Gurkhas that he cut a dashing figure, full of exciting tales about his participation in Orde ...”

“... outskirts of Boston would later give its name, Bellmont, to an entire suburb. Like others of their class and time, including their friends Henry James and Edith Wharton, the Boits travelled back and forth across the Atlantic and took up residence in France and Italy at various periods, as well as in Boston and Newport. Sometime in the late 1870s, Ned Boit, as ...”

“... though doubtless their shadows were twinned – should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the ...”