“... resentments that underpinned the Thirties notion of classlessness because they suggested to the broad middle class that the working class, and particularly the trade-unionised working class, was the greater threat. ‘Classlessness’ now meant ‘working-classlessness’. The classless society became one where members of the working class did not think of ...”

“... stylistic flair of a work of political journalism, it is too philosophical to be accessible to a broad public’. Some of the most interesting of the Essays in Understanding shed new light on Arendt’s larger philosophical concerns. Among other things, they show that she took quite seriously her own claim (often dismissed as hyperbole) that the forms of ...”

“... to the present). The term ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), coined in the 1840s by Richard Owen, is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn ...”

“... father of lies’) who was actually the first ethnographer, had a quite exceptionally ‘broad and non-judgmental’ view of ethnic identity, based on culture rather than biology. His perspective, Geary writes, was ‘pre-Orientalist’: he refused ‘to denigrate the customs of others’. His successors, on the other hand, especially in the Roman ...”

“... then, that as a spectator sport tennis has become such a big and well-managed business that a broad gulf now exists between the thinning ranks of weekend amateurs and the growing number of playing pros. You used to feel that the difference between yourself and a superb player like Budge Patty was a matter of degree. He was more consistent, hit ...”

“... championed in Scott’s Essay on the History of English Church Architecture of 1881. But the broad high spaces of their urban churches were often decidedly Germanic, while the decorating drew on Flemish art. In the era of Sir Giles, a dash of Spanish Gothic entered the equation, as in his exquisite Lady Chapel at Liverpool Cathedral. These things go ...”

“... medium in which literary reputations survive. What kept the Eliot conversation going was a fairly broad agreement that The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’ and some other poems provided a durable image of what he himself called ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. As Eliot’s fame grew, critics inevitably ...”

“... have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as ...”

“... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...”

“... Lambert of Manhattan, where testamentary matters were heard, then hit the papers. Though pretty broad-minded, even Kempton assumed from the PLO bequest that Sparks had lost his mind. ‘Growing old without wife or child must have been lonely enough to do a certain disservice to his judgment,’ he speculated. Still, he insisted, a man had a right to be ...”

“... sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no ...”

“... on the Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or unconsciously, from the propaganda of ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... name and was meant to consign the sectarian convulsions of the decade to the past. In 1659, under Richard Cromwell, Marvell obtained his parliamentary seat as a court nominee sent from Whitehall to defeat a powerful republican candidate. When the Parliament met he savoured the defeat of the republicans and of their ‘maxim’ that ‘all power is in the ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”