“... Lipno, Poland, as Barbara Apolonia Chalupec, the third and only surviving child of an upper-middle-class Polish woman who had married a part-Romany Slovakian tinsmith. Her father drifted into seditious activity against the tsarist occupiers; and when Pola was six years old he was arrested and, in time, exiled to Siberia. When he was released more than ten ...”

“... wanted mandatory religious studies, which the French vehemently opposed, and so an ethics class was decided on as a compromise. Pupils would study most subjects in their own language, but would learn geography and history in a foreign language and from a foreign point of view. Just 12 years after the end of the Second World ...”

“... refuse” of their native shores; instead, many of the enslaved Africans were a true people of class – a reality almost antithetical to the stereotyping of slaves as simple “black folk”.’ I have no doubt that, if you insist on thinking in terms of ‘flotsam and jetsam’, you could fairly say that Europe, not to mention Asia, shipped a lot of ...”

“... in the potential cultural market, brought about by the growth of the white-collar lower-middle class and by advances in the disposable income and amount of leisure time enjoyed by most sections of the community. By the Twenties, for example, a gramophone could be bought for about four pounds, which may have represented a week’s wages for T.S. Eliot’s ...”

“... a degree course in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. After an interruption in his studies due to war service in the RAF, the dashing young socialist was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947 and, within three years, became Labour candidate in a by-election in Bristol South East. He was literally returned to Westminster. Jad Adams has written a much ...”

“... as a novel, they are apt to leave unmistakable traces of their poetic craft. Indeed a certain class of novelists, not far below the very best, makes it an axiom to inform us from time to time, in case it has slipped our mind, that they rest their case in the end on a much more precise theory and practice of language than the on-going bustle of narrative ...”

“... at the top eventually produced that trade-off which Harold Perkin memorably called the ‘viable class society’, class without ruinous conflict. The Victorian compromise, Wiener asserts, lasted right up to the present. And so the work ethic was washed down in a bumper of roses and wine. In outline this is of course a ...”

“... probably the most important of the batch here under review. Garnett belonged to that now extinct class of person called ‘bookmen’; his wife Constance was a bookwoman, and her translations from the Russian probably had as much influence on English fiction as her husband’s judgments, in his capacity as publisher’s reader and reviewer, of new indigenous ...”

“... own views on negation. True enough, he was sometimes dismissive, as, for example, of post-war ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, even though, as Mr Baker suggests, that was often directed against what were also his own major enemies. He dismissed it, however, as shallow, superficial, lacking seriousness, not as nonsense. This failure to come to terms ...”

“... Bennett family, goes to exclusive Williams College, distinguishes himself in the OSS during the war, rises to Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA, falls heir to the Bennett industrial empire and ends up ‘Master of Loon Lake’. Thus abstracted, Loon Lake can be seen to make the same grand assertion as Ragtime: the tentacles of capitalism extend ...”

“... friends, and gives him the fourth feather herself. Written in the aftermath of the Boer War, the book aimed to challenge the uncritical army worship and shrill imperialism of the 1890s. An Oxford graduate in his mid-thirties, Mason was a playwright, former actor and soon-to-be Liberal MP. In 1910, his fascination with psychology and analytical ...”

“... but smaller and more coherent than the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, its only world-class competitors. Not only does its development manifest relative academic coherence, being constrained in disciplinary scope to the social sciences, its lack of antiquity is crucial in endowing its story with dramatic unity, being nicely contained within the ...”

“... didn’t have time to get to the library. Tomorrow we will. Are you still the best reader in the class?’ She nudged him. ‘Are you?’ ‘S’pose so,’ he mumbled. Every evening after school mother took him to the tiny library nearby where he exchanged the previous day’s books. Tonight, though, there hadn’t been time. She didn’t want father asking ...”

“... had been getting poorer ever since markets for their produce began to decline after World War One. Rumours of new opportunities and a temperate climate, later reinforced by the draw of the movies, had been attracting South-Western migrants to California since the second decade of the century. More arrived there between 1910 and 1930 than during the ...”

“... has a beautiful campus laid out by the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram just before the Great War; Cram’s original Byzantine-eclectic halls and quadrangles are still being gracefully augmented by sympathetic architects such as Cesar Pelli. Fox is the author of the covetable AIA guide to Houston, published in 1990 and so covering the immense expansion of ...”