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“... to the Celestial City. The world of Athens and Rome might have been more vivid to educated middle-class men, but those who had not been schooled in the classics invested biblical landscapes with the elegiac force of childhood experience. The Hellenist Matthew Arnold pointed out in his contemptuous analysis of Nonconformist Hebraism that the fervours of ...”

“... in a storm of directives, he is basically trying to keep his place in the continual churn of the war and the Final Solution: trying to run the camp as economically and frictionlessly as possible, trying to keep his wife, stay on top of his zealous underlings, chase after the impressive and intimidating manliness that was never at any time his. He is a ...”

“... of the phenomenon, Ronald Paulson characterised jestbooks as writing from below, as labouring-class culture defiantly thumbing its nose at polite taste. Inexpensive chapbooks of the kind produced by the Dicey family in the middle decades of the century, and distributed via a ramshackle network of itinerant peddlers and provincial booksellers, seem to ...”

“... schools that taught them. In ‘La Bataille des VII arts’ (c.1230), Henri d’Andeli depicts a war between the logicians of Paris and the grammarians of Orléans, the last bastion of classical and literary studies. The daughter of Madame Astronomy predicts the date of the battle, Arithmetic counts the troops, and Canon Law rides haughtily in the ...”

“... the Party workers. In the early 1950s Feltrinelli decided that he wanted to create a large working-class library and cultural centre, containing all the key texts of Marxist and trade-union history. Although there were already signs that he would have difficulty toeing the Party line, he arranged, with the agreement of Togliatti – the PCI tried to control ...”

“... Leonardo DiCaprio produced a Netflix documentary filmed in the DRC called Virunga: Conservation Is War. In South Africa’s national parks, ‘bite dogs’ were trained to pin suspects to the ground. One dog, Arrow, set a parachute-jump world record. Another, called Killer, intercepted 115 poachers and was awarded a Dickin medal for gallantry and bravery in ...”

“... parishes because of a spate of killings. There has been a popular backlash against a political class accused of corruption (huge increases in salaries for parliamentarians were recently proposed). Calls for reparations are made and contested, and the narratives of plantation tours are sometimes questioned. There is the prospect of the island breaking with ...”

“... those of his friends on the left who feel the subject to be unimportant alongside the issues of class. Nairn derides not merely the ‘Royal Socialism’ of the Labour Party but the whole Ukanian notion of ‘class’, which here denotes a sort of lumpish, self-encapsulating and self-perpetuating ...”

“... I turned the tables and asked the students about Gypsies – whom only one girl in the whole class could tell me of, because she was one. Political leaders, however, don’t generally talk to students, and never discover the dream they seem to harbour that Australia should be a truly alternative West. Our present masters were no sooner in office than ...”

“... for tonight’s flight. When I changed my ticket, they reminded me that Continental has no such class on this flight, though I’ll avail of it on the Virgin flight back. Maybe they’ll reimburse me the difference? I go back to the desk and explain the situation and am delighted to be bumped up from economy to first ...”

“... woman), ‘the use of sterilisation in the fight against feeble-mindedness centred on lower-class women of questionable moral standards,’ and (in Mallory’s case at least) depended on a rationale that came down to the charged phrase ‘incapable of leading a clean and proper life’: the feeling that her mothering was not up to scratch. At this end ...”

“... week, every term for three years. Shortly before Ellis arrived, every student was getting a Leavis class four times a week. Supervisions on their essays were usually with one of Leavis’s former students, hand-picked to cement the great man’s precepts. The big events were the classes with the master. One of these classes is memorably imagined in ...”

“... city-state, the formation of Christendom, the rise of capitalism and the stirrings of working-class resistance.Moral philosophy had suffered especially badly from this ‘lack of historical sense’. The notions it deals with – ‘courage’ and ‘compassion’, for example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence ...”

“... like nobilis to Romans in 42 bc, was a signifier not only of good character but also of social class, and everyone knew the two often didn’t go together, however much they were supposed to. One of the things that Antony implies by calling Brutus ‘the noblest Roman’ is that he was the most committed to maintaining the values and privileges of his ...”

“... He didn’t do well at school or at Sandhurst; nor did he distinguish himself during the war. Although he did the élite thing in volunteering for the Royal Flying Corps, he won no medals – a matter of some regret for a man who passionately believed in individual heroism. (One of the very few things Mosley says about his son in My Life is that he ...”