“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it. A fuck-you can be sent via satirical parties (Iceland’s Best Party won the election for mayor of Reykjavik; Hungary’s Two-Tailed ...”

“... of the two main parties, which were still floundering about in the ‘detritus’ of the civil war. The ‘fug of cant, hypocrisy and recrimination’ that blighted Irish political life was, he said, impossible to shift while the Dáil was crowded ‘with the immediate relatives of dead or surviving politicians, many of them quite unfitted for public ...”

“... the interwar period as being firmly on the side of anti-unionism and fascism, a desire for cross-class co-operation and social compromise existed among German employers even in the Weimar Republic. A further misconception about the inter-war period, widely shared by outside observers, is that the deep aversion to inflation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out of changes in the social structure – in particular, the diminution of the classical working class and rise of an intelligentsia many of whom are the children of this class. But the connection is also negative. There is among many Labour voters and the doctrinaires in the Party a divergent, indeed an almost totally ...”

“... during the period of sometimes rather disordered growth between 1950-1975. This ‘new class’, of qualified personnel, is electorally supported, moreover, by slightly less or slightly more than half the French population – it varies between 49 per cent and 51 per cent – and takes in all those who from 1958 to 1980 felt left out of the ...”

“... 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 ...”