“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to write about subjects in the forefront of popular consciousness: American football and nuclear war (End Zone, 1972), pop music (Great Jones Street, 1973), communications from outer space (Ratner’s Star, 1976), clandestine intelligence (Running Dog, 1978), terrorism (The Names, 1982), suburban life and ecological disaster (White Noise, 1985), the ...”

“... And then the men turned to their studies. Before long, almost every man was enrolled in a class, and some in three: classes on Marxist-Leninist theory, on economics and psychology, on literature and languages, and on history ancient and modern. As they remarked, they were privileged to have time to read and write and discuss. Except that they didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”