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“... George Orwell remarked that English anti-semitism might be regarded as a fairly harmless upper-class habit until 1933, but not after that. The essay on Disraeli, it seems, was published in 1931. MacCarthy also felt strongly about the avant-garde in the arts, and wrote some just things about the manner in which very poor works might make their ...”

“... varies in quality and age: old, formerly private, apartment blocks include some excellent pre-war flats as well as some illequipped and decaying properties. There are also some new apartments built to fairly high standards. All of these are let at very low rents. Co-operative housing construction is in various ways subsidised by the state, but the owners ...”

“... it. For anyone who can see, and God knows Cobb doesn’t go about with his eyes shut, a first-class funeral may often be tragic, but it is also much better than a family dinner: it is a kind of photographic developer and fixer of the life of the notables. Especially in the department of the Nord: in Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing this sad ceremony was the ...”

“... Irish economy and domestic agriculture until, by the early 19th century, there survived a peasant class more miserable than any other in Europe, ‘a social order’, as Salaman says, ‘in which the distinction between the amenities of human life and those of the beasts of the field had become blurred’. In their turf cabins, the enormous families, six or ...”

“... intellect, Fulfilled creation singing its own praise. His small theatre of the Residenz In World War II was bombed to smithereens Yet could be put back as it was, because Its dazzling inner shell was lath and gauze, A kit of plaster panels and silk screens They stashed away until the world saw sense. At Vegas, the last Grand Prix of the year Before he died ...”

“... happening now is actually …(She trails off.)Baker’s play takes place in an amateur dramatics class in Vermont and the excerpt is characteristic of its halting and elliptical dialogue. ‘I would like to say that I write for everyone,’ Baker has explained, ‘but I probably just write for depressed people who enjoy ambiguity and long silences.’ It’s ...”

“... from New Orleans called Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun; it was a condemnation of George Bush’s War on Terror and of his epic mishandling of the storm relief effort in 2005. As instruments of enlightenment and weapons of social justice, these books worked: they vividly illustrate the way the poor, dispossessed and dark-skinned tend to suffer the most in ...”

“... resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism. Or, it emphasises the fact that the ...”

“... her relationship with her first husband, the Greek schoolteacher Dmitri, who is decidedly middle-class, and a member of a subject people, while the Young Turk Selim, Nilofer’s second husband, is a strong supporter of women’s rights. Interestingly, abolishing the veil is the only one of his stated aims that still troubles modern Turkey. The irony is that ...”

“... and the twins’ joyful childhood (‘You came from happiness, my darlings’). Mike’s lower-class father is warmly embraced by the High Court judge; there are glorious days at Dulwich Picture Gallery, picnics in St James’s Park. Lest we gag on treacle, Paula assures us that a ‘happy home’ is a ‘fantasy out of which we all have to be ...”

“... and Bryndís, the daughter of Björgvin, the son of Sigurour. In short, Iceland is a ruthless class society. It turns out that 300,000 people are not enough to support a floating currency on the international markets: 300,000 people, most of whom work far too many hours to be able to take part in politics, are also not enough to support a language in a ...”

“... were locked away in its Secretum for decades, accessible only to those whose gender and class supposedly made them invulnerable to corruption. John Woodroffe (1865-1936) was typical of Britons with a penchant for Tantra: by day a judge on the Calcutta High Court, renowned for his severity, he was by night an ardent Tantrika, publishing translations ...”

“... true, are doing badly. And the rich are getting conspicuously richer. But the forecasts of civil war tend to unreality in two ways: first, those who make these forecasts are usually not those who are about to make civil war themselves (though they claim to know a man who will); and second, they often inflate what is going ...”

“... the evolving tongue of modernity. Said began to speak it in earnest in 1967, after the Six-Day War: ‘That awful week in June’, he calls it, when he grasped more fully that ‘I was an Arab, and we – “you” to most of my embarrassed friends – were being whipped.’ From this cat-o’-nine-tails initiation was born Orientalism, his most celebrated ...”

“... which demands the expansive treatment Bair has given it. Beauvoir lived at the centre of post-war French intellectual ferment; in addition to her feminist and philosophical writings, she wrote six novels, four volumes of memoirs, and books on America, China, old age, sickness and death. As ‘Sainte Simone’, she became the mother of the modern women’s ...”