“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered.’ He then survived the First World War, in which, as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, he had been so badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme that his commanding officer wrote a letter of condolence to his parents and his death was announced in the Times (the paper was decent enough to ...”

“... student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the journey, The First Mate’s Log, appeared from OUP. This frenetic activity was not typical of Collingwood’s life up to that point. True, he was always an insomniac workaholic, but he had lived undemonstratively, and ...”

“... to the Journal when it was first published, Barbellion was a product of ‘that most unfortunate class, the poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances’. Instead of going to university, he earned his keep on a local paper, where his father worked. Later, he came to regret not making more of journalism, but at the time he’d rather ...”

“... pick their way with caution. There had indeed been a disaster, Robb concludes: the Hundred Years War. This is a point scored against the baggage-train approach to history, according to which the war is long over. Estienne’s Guide itself makes no reference to it, but historical sources rarely make explicit reference to ...”

“... panache, style, oratory and wit, but no one who was a mediocrity could have governed Britain in war and peace through 15 of the most difficult and turbulent years in the country’s history, nor is there any reason to regard the bishops whom he created as notably second-rate. There is, however, another reason for his dim reputation. As Professor Gash points ...”

“... is the full justification of it to reason.’In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, Douglass continued to advocate a violent response to the Fugitive Slave Act and to slavery itself, skewering pacifist abolitionists and their futile ambition to ‘frown slave holders down’. Blight argues persuasively that Douglass’s manicheanism was ...”