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“... of tension and threatened collapse, takes the stubborn realities of the city into its language. Class, for instance, appears in ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ not as ‘a polemically contrived image’ but as a ‘brute reality ... simply there, obdurate, intractable, as that which will not go away’. Baudelaire thus undoes, as Prendergast says, ‘one of the ...”

“... the 1830s into heavy industry. The disruptions that followed the start of the American Civil War merely slowed the creation of wealth. Hardly missing a beat, the Glaswegians changed tack, transforming the Clyde into one of the busiest shipyards in the world. In such a place someone like Thomson, raised in modest circumstances, without the benefit of much ...”

“... as rights, liberties or customs, and uniformly as being denied to ‘the people’ by a ruling-class conspiracy. In Early Modern England, justice was at war with property, and property emerged victorious. There are pieces that celebrate images of Robin Hood, empathise with vagabonds and extol gypsies. Hill’s spotlight ...”

“... with apartments for Men servants and such like conveniences.’ Many of the assumptions of upper-class 18th-century society he exposed in that paragraph. The most obvious is the male view that all guests come to visit only the master of the house. This enables Sir John to forget to locate his wife. Is Lady Clerk allowed to occupy the central block with her ...”

“... she cribbed a great deal from – of all people – Dr Leavis himself. Then came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the ...”

“... represented by naming these conflicts, supported by the deep emotions now provoked by the evils of war and poverty and disease which they cause, is seen as leading to what is in effect a movement of conversion. An analogy with the situation of the first Christians is often directly made. Styles of campaigning, in the peace movement and also in ecological and ...”

“... himself as a tit-man but the real woman is a tit-woman. In the pop annals of the transatlantic sex war, we have often heard the male denounce the archetypal woman as a ‘ball-breaker’. It now appears from this book that the American female has good reason to regard her archetypal man as what can be dubbed a ‘tit-puncturer’. Quite why the Atlantic should ...”

“... There is a brilliant depiction of the inner life of the failed painter, indeed of the whole sad class of hangers-on of the arts whose vocation has failed them yet has totally disabled them for any other kind of life. The experiences of Anne, the religious returned to the world, are equally closely examined. Though here a radical ambiguity begins. How are we ...”

“... but the political structure insecure; later, the country shows a relatively mature political class, for all that her political institutions were fairly primitive, based on a stumbling and hesitant economy. The limitation of this book is that it cannot avoid expecting readers already to have some idea, however misguided, of Scottish history. Important ...”

“... found themselves asking what his links were with Oliver North. I have on my desk the daubs of a class of five-year-olds from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same organisation as McCarthy’s friend Jill Morrell, I was asked by the ...”

“... with its panoply of advice, expertise and expense, is a characteristically middle-aged and middle-class ritual. It is a (literal) rite of passage into bourgeois adulthood; a process inevitably heralded and defined by possessions – or, to be strictly accurate, by the ownership of any single item too large or valuable to be loaded into the back of a transit ...”

“... the young Ryan was molested in the attic studio of a neighbour’s house by Bob Stoller, a Korean War veteran who had set up shop as a child photographer. The molester gained the young Ryan’s trust and then, his seduction achieved, skilfully turned his victim’s sense of violation into the sort of shame that would guarantee his silence. The end came when ...”

“... For both the idea of art, the lure of fame, the wish to escape from the stolid Northern middle class into which they were born, were motivating forces as powerful as the desire to express a vision through painting or sculpture. Hepworth was born in 1903, the daughter of a Wakefield surveyor. Wood, the older by two years, was the son of a doctor in ...”

“... anything positive about the desires and interests at issue. And, except in her chapters on World War Two and its immediate after-math, Haste’s factual survey of an entire century leaves the reader with little sense of the myriad choices, decisions and negotiations within and between individuals which make social revolutions. A shorter time-span and a more ...”

“... became clues to the explanation for my own feeling of wrongness. In the wake of the First Gulf War, our cloistered world in Amman was penetrated by the internet and cable TV, and online chat rooms and American sitcoms offered a language and a way of thinking previously unimaginable to adolescents like me, who had no words with which to conceive their ...”