“... 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 ...”

“... procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”