“... is what he was. He stole other people’s things. ‘The younger element, brought up after the war and influenced by Hollywood’s gangster films, thought that guns were glamorous instead of just dangerous,’ writes Reynolds, himself an evacuee during the war. ‘They made armed robbery fashionable but shut themselves ...”

“... to be friendly but soon lost interest. She was expecting another child, who was to be a dashing war hero and heartbreaker called George. Economies must be practised, with an eye to George’s future. Stephen and Andrew no longer had cake for tea, Elsa lashed herself into furies over spilled jam. Depressing Scotticisms flew from her tongue: ‘Mony a mickle ...”

“... insanity to avoid a treason charge for the seditious radio talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 years. The old man McLuhan and Kenner saw there wasn’t insane. He was the same brilliant, manipulative, unrepentant fascist and antisemite he had always been and remained until his death, despite occasional public ...”

“... a physical and psychic toll, what Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett call ‘the hidden injuries of class’. On the kill floors, most workers are ‘at-will’ employees and can be fired at any time. In 2019, the annual turnover in many Texan slaughterhouses was 100 per cent.The ethnographer Timothy Pachirat describes industrial slaughterhouses – along with ...”

“... any potential abuse of power.’ But the foreign funds that flooded into Afghanistan after the war distorted this relationship, creating an elite class divorced from the rest of the people. That the international community continued to back these strongmen mystified her. Hamidi was reluctant to name names, but I thought ...”

“... to begin a paragraph by paraphrasing some commonly held view of the English: ‘Removing the lower-class Englishman from his own environment evidently had the effect of loosening his moral moorings’; ‘The English were proud of their lack of vindictiveness’; ‘For the English the most savage war seemed a kind of ...”

“... of Fitzpatrick’s chief themes is the way individuals edited and presented their lives, and their class identities, both to the authorities and to one another. She uncovers citizens who falsified their credentials in order to conceal their bourgeois past, and con-artists who exploited the opportunities provided by the upheaval and chaos that followed the ...”

“... of Boty’s lost painting Scandal ’63. His memories, which stretch back before the Second World War, are the historical elements of Smith’s collage and serve as reminders that times have been worse than they were in 2016, despite the novel’s opening lines: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again.’ The allusions are as plentiful ...”

“... to say, belongs mostly to power. Inoculation by push-button has consistently reinforced the class distinction between those who own or manipulate information and those who have little to dispose of other than their energy. Plotnick’s instructive term for the capacity created in this way is ‘digital command’. Pressure applied by a finger, or ...”

“... even its expression is bathetic. Yates’s difficult childhood, his time as a soldier during World War Two, his painful personal and professional life after the war, his alcoholism, are all revisited obsessively in his fiction. Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road is a young veteran whose high hopes for the future dissolve ...”

“... supplied the world with wheat. The British and French blockade of Odessa during the Crimean War made the world realise it needed to diversify wheat supplies; Kansas and Nebraska rushed to meet the need. Odessa was also one of the centres of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, with the proportion of Jews holding steady at around a third of the ...”

“... Anti-immigrant sentiments were cleverly fused by the Cheney-Bush administration with its War on Terror, and in the current rhetoric – exemplified by the fanatical anchorman Lou Dobbs on CNN – ‘terrorist’ and ‘illegal alien’ have become interchangeable terms in the fear-mongering over ‘security’ and ‘protecting our borders’. A ...”

“... year was unusually favourable. Climbing without supplementary oxygen (pioneered by First World War bomber pilots) Major Edward Norton of the British Army and a London surgeon, Howard Somervell, got to 28,126 feet, less than 900 feet below the summit, at which height the atmosphere holds only a third of the oxygen we breathe at sea level. Four days later ...”

“... the ‘tribe of second-rate young women’ with whom Barney surrounded herself. The Second World War found them stranded together in the hills above Florence – for the duration – in Brooks’s new home, the Villa Sant’Agnese. It was a disastrous experiment in cohabitation. Both by now were in their sixties. Barney was heartsick over the ...”

“... doctrines sanctioning public concealment of private faith – to the defeat of the Peasants’ War in Germany and milieux close to Anabaptism, well before the rise of Calvin, whose attacks on Nicodemism coined the term. There followed his vivid portrait of the autodidact Italian miller Menocchio, whose cosmology of spontaneous generation – the world born ...”