“... families, earning somewhere between $18,576 and $74,304. But this isn’t a rising middle class. In the last six years of the Eighties, it shrank from 71 per cent of all families to 63 per cent. Looked at another way again, the wealth of all but the richest 1 per cent declined on average in these years by a percentage point a year. Real incomes also ...”

“... legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his tailor, who, like most of Disraeli’s ...”

“... take it to the next cradle. It’s after Ursula has experienced for herself the end of the war in Berlin that she takes the decision to assassinate Hitler before he can become Chancellor. The moment of her death in 1945 seems to be a moment of particular insight. In a ruined Berlin, she decides to kill herself and her daughter (it’s the only timeline ...”

“... with the worst of the breaking and burning done and an inkling of confidence among the political class that the ‘crisis’ is surmountable, Nicolas Sarkozy – who’d begun to look isolated in the government – has seen his position steadily improve. The public, no longer quite so nervous, has rewarded him for his outspokenness with a boost in his ...”

“... already censored themselves in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), using carefully coded terms for class struggle and capitalism; subsequently Adorno took his name off the (excellent) book he had written with Eisler on cinema music, Composing for the Films (1947). Eisler went on to write the DDR’s national anthem, while Adorno’s trenchant opposition to ...”

“... but famine was averted; instead, as they saw their savings evaporate, Russians witnessed a civil war on the streets of their cities. Before Chechnya, before Turkmenistan, there was the war in Moscow, Petersburg and Yeltsin’s hometown of Ekaterinberg. Well-armed gangs were at one another’s throats, and you never knew ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the political order today. In this version, the First Republic that emerged at the end of the war collapsed, amid dramatic convulsions, in the early 1990s. Out of its demise a more modern configuration has emerged, still incomplete, but already a critical improvement on its predecessor. It is the full accomplishment of this Second Republic, for which ...”

“... offer and opportunity touted in the advertisement pages of the comics he reads, goes with his class to visit a Wall Street firm with which his class teacher, Mrs Joubert, is connected. Between them they have saved up enough money for a single share in the business, and naturally the firm seizes on the opportunity to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent means to the country’s political class – the international standing they imagine it gives them – it is unlikely that a Cameron government would do away with it, whatever the expense.If value for money is the concern, Cameron could easily take an axe to the whole Home Office apparatus, whose ...”

“... 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 ...”