“... a blood relation, so it seemed, to almost everyone in the upper – that is, the newsworthy – class. Whoever we were hunting down with a telephone, a Who’s Who and an envelope of press cuttings would turn out to be a ‘cousin’: if not a relative, a schoolfellow; if not a schoolfellow, a neighbour; if not someone who lived near his family in the ...”

“... was a different vision. ‘That by which a State is advanced,’ they held, ‘is agriculture and war,’ and they supposed that human behaviour is best determined by the judicious application of pleasures and pains. Like many theorists of this persuasion, they found the pains easier to provide than the pleasures. They urged savage laws. Yet although the ...”

“... met at intervals in different places – in Singapore, in Yunnan, in Hanoi. He got mixed up in one war and I in another; it was all a long time ago, and the world we were swanning about in has disappeared. Civis Romanus sum – that was what an Englishman in the Far East used to feel at the beginning of this period. Later we unlearnt that, but my impression of ...”

“... selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres & Smith turned their production over to military headgear. He persisted nevertheless, setting off day after day, decade after decade, as fashions changed and fewer people wore hats of any ...”

“... moment at which the demand for mixed colleges occurred. This was the era of civil rights, anti-war protest and women’s liberation, causes which convulsed campus life across the Western world. The demand for coeducation can be read as one more sign of the egalitarian and febrile mood of the times. Although cultural revolution provides a noisy backdrop, it ...”

“... What follows is the familiar brilliant travelogue, with observations on the Portuguese colonial class system and the mindless social round. Occasionally there is a burst of anger, as when a restaurant owner torments a man who is laying tiles for him: With us, and his other customers, the owner was as civil as always; but then, switching character and ...”

“... to what Senator Moynihan sees as his country’s historic loss of nerve, following the Vietnam war, and its retreat from the leadership of what he considers to be the cause of liberty. He looks back with nostalgia to the crusading ideals of President Wilson, the pinnacle of American prestige in the world, and to their reassertion in John F. Kennedy’s ...”

“... of English – seen by Eagleton as a pernicious mystification serving the interests of the ruling class – in the first chapter of his bestseller Literary Theory (1983). But Collini chides Eagleton for misrepresenting a central element in his story and observes that the related thesis of Chris Baldick in The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 ...”

“... who was going to wind up bottom of the heap. The Irish won but, judging by Bainbridge Avenue, the war is not over. Though undoubtedly the ugliest aspect of the Irish presence in America, racism isn’t its only blemish. Almost as hard to take is the collective idiocy of St Patrick’s Day, when green beer is swilled by men whose shaven heads have been ...”

“... is journalism, a topic touched on in his first novel, God’s Pocket(1984), set in working-class Philadelphia. The new novel is about a crime, and has a crime thriller’s feel, but as in some police procedurals, the milieu of the investigator, in this case a journalistic milieu, overshadows that of both criminal and victim. The investigators in ...”

“... or cafés, where he gradually discovered the one true gift he possessed – for agitation. World War One rescued him from a miserable existence. The Army was his first experience of a regulated social life, in close contact with others, and also gave him recognition for his achievements as a soldier. The military defeat and the collapse of Imperial Germany ...”

“... who says things like ‘J’habite Metroland’ in his orals is riding lawlessly in first class when he becomes the captive audience of an ‘old sod . . . dead bourgeois’ who gives him a rundown of the distinguished history of the line. One of its finest achievements, the boy learns, was to lay on two Pullman coaches (Mayflower and Galatea) for its ...”

“... in Malay, which he had brought back from years spent in a Japanese concentration camp during World War Two? Not to mention the bishop, described in the Congo Journal as ‘a wonderfully handsome old man with an 18th-century manner – or perhaps the manner of an Edwardian “boulevardier”’? What if this ‘pilgrim of the dry season’ – the sarcastic ...”

“... Liberal Democrats will provide safe refuge for swing voters in the South disgusted by culture war sadism; if the SNP’s finance scandal festers Labour might even regain some of its former Scottish bastions. The nation is miserable and conditions are favourable, but this hardly diminishes Starmer’s achievement: he has isolated the left within his ...”

“... made up 2.7 million people, more than a quarter of the population. Within sixty years this social class had all but disappeared. Post-famine shifts in agriculture from tillage to pasture reduced the demand for labour, encouraging further emigration. Tenant farmers, meanwhile, began to challenge landlords for greater rights to their holdings. They ultimately ...”