“... in the Northern states. The South had always been pro-British, dating back to the Civil War, when it was to Britain that the Confederacy had looked for international support. After the Union’s victory, the South no longer had an army of its own. Its martial culture, therefore, could only find expression through the American army, which made the ...”

“... same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have followed the Cold War – not the American Empire, but a wider settlement of which US supremacy was just one part. This imperium has generated global resistance, which all purchasers are now invited to approve, in the name of democracy. Hardt and Negri’s multitude should not be ...”

“... on Ukraine has produced the largest and swiftest mass movement of women since the Second World War. More than four million women have been displaced within Ukraine and around the same number have fled the country. Many of those who left, congregating in towns and cities in Poland, or taking buses and trains to other European capitals, went ...”

“... his feet were firmly on the ground either side of it: fitting, no doubt, for a decorated World War One infantryman who liked to stand and be counted. In Champagne in 1914, when an enemy shell landed nearby and two of his colleagues wisely flung themselves to the ground, De Gaulle remained in the asparagus position. As a soldier and a statesman, he was ...”

“... Jewish homeland, Theodor Herzl imagined it as having British institutions, an English-style upper class and even Jewish cricket on trim Palestinian, or indeed – did it matter? – Ugandan lawns. This was at a time when significant sections of continental Europe saw Jews as alien, hostile and incapable of being assimilated by German or French culture ...”

“... Burton. Only losers leave their stories to the East London Advertiser and the more literate class of probation officer. Take that McVicar. He was totally out of order. An armed robber, ‘one of the top men of his profession’ (Lambrianou), he blew all his advantages. Flash bastard, he decided to become his own ghost. Someone should have marked his ...”

“... which at times reads like a lightly edited CV, is designed to show his superiority to his working-class peers, as well as his fitness for public office. He describes scholarships won, interviews aced, clerkships granted, all, he reminds us, in spite of the odds. And yet he also continuously deflects attention from himself, often by including social ...”

“... being: one of the first of that generation of pop stars to be found cool on account of their class, their vowels, their cheek and their style. But thrillingly, Lulu – unlike so many of her starry pals – has held onto her hunger, and every paragraph of her autobiography is a battle to win ground from the hurters: every sentence sets out to convey the ...”

“... Forum on Literature and Art’, a text which declared the subservience of literature to the class struggle. And in Stockholm before receiving the prize, Mo Yan spoke up in favour of censorship: it was, he said, a bit like airport security. The cadres were already moving swiftly to turn his ancestral village into a literary theme park. Among the ...”

“... surname, ‘de Montaigne’. The 16th-century French nobility was a heterogeneous and expanding class. In theory you were noble or you weren’t; in practice there were ambiguities and gradations. The old or upper nobility, the noblesse d’épée, was a small hereditary class containing descendants of the medieval ...”

“... T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on the centrality of the French avant-garde. Even as social and psychological ...”

“... less a scion of some ancient Whig house. He was born, as he once told me, into the ‘working-class squirearchy’ of the South Wales coalfield. His father, Arthur Jenkins, was a miner, who went down the pit at the age of 12, worked underground until his late thirties, and ended as president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, a Labour MP and Clement ...”

“... economic and ‘symbolic’ ones concerning the material welfare and peace of mind of the middle class: trade policies and the pledge of allegiance, yes, but not the Iran arms sale or our behaviour in Central America. Nor did the living conditions of blacks, Hispanics and the homeless end up mattering very much. Aids propaganda may have contributed something ...”

“... thing was brought to a summary – and apocalyptic – conclusion by the outbreak of a new world war. The 1989 celebrations ought to avoid that fate, but their success should not be taken for granted. The bitter rivalry between Mitterrand’s Elysée and Chirac’s Hôtel de Ville has already caused the cancellation of Mitterrand’s plan for an ...”

“... you believe them when they say they were prepared to stay out another year. Just as countries at war adapt their economies to special production and consumption needs, Grimethorpe developed a successful strike economy. The black-market selling of coal is an example of this. Shops cut prices and gave credit. A barter system evolved, using allotment-grown ...”