“... of Israel (i.e. those who did not become refugees in 1948). The Israeli Arabs are already second-class citizens, suffering from subtle methods of apartheid in areas such as housing and unemployment: the removal of their voting rights would reduce them to a status not much higher than that of South Africa’s blacks. Yet Dr O’Brien envisages certain ...”

“... writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb maintained that there was nothing preordained in Lebanon’s civil war, that Lebanon had been ‘at peace for centuries’. And in the Balkans in the 1990s, people insisted: ‘I did not even know people’s ethnic group – I have a Serb father, a Croat mother … We were Yugoslavs.’ All these countries can offer equally ...”

“... in the history of everyday life, from Viking longships to the Home Front during the Second World War. What’s taught at more advanced levels is narrower and more problematical. Yet here it reflects not just the choices made by teachers and schools, but also the preferences of students themselves, who from the age of 14 have a good deal of freedom to choose ...”

“... to Lucullus in the hope of a suitable reward: ‘But when Pompey took over the command of the war he treated as enemies all those who had done any favour to Lucullus because of his personal hostility to him; and when he had finished the war and gone home he saw to it that any honours which Lucullus had promised to ...”

“... being taught to despise them. Leavisism, as a cult of the years before and after the Second World War, cleverly adapted the study of literature to the requirements of the age of meritocracy. It selected from among the best of their generation – undergraduates studying the humanities at Cambridge – a yet smaller cadre of the highly serious. It drilled them ...”

“... his fingers are calloused by hard work and scoffs, Bolshevik-style, at the pampered hands of the class enemy, the banker Gusinsky. Jews like Gusinsky, homosexuals, intellectuals of any kind and women who go out to work are all subjected to the contempt of a Soviet patriot – a contempt which has its roots in Korzhakov’s strong institutional loyalty to his ...”

“... on to note that Irishmen were particularly prone to this temptation, for the gap between ruling-class pretence and brutal reality had been wider for longer in Ireland than anywhere else, and this had affected even those who (like himself) were sufficiently privileged to be spared the worst of that reality. ‘For some Irishmen, including some who were not ...”

“... years before’. His biographer describes him as ‘classically laissez-faire in everything from war to income tax’. Nobody ever called him a progressive.Even Ross’s fabled editorial prowess is portrayed with condescension, sometimes by those who come to praise him. We read of his pedantry, his literal-mindedness, his mad grammarian’s ...”

“... ended in 1914. What followed cast things in a very different light. German intellectuals went to war with a shrill defence of the peculiar virtues supposedly embodied in German Kultur. German inwardness and spiritual depth became ideological weapons against Russian ‘barbarism’ and the ‘superficial’ British and French. Thomas Mann’s Observations of ...”

“... done this’ – and, for an English audience especially, it offers the nagging fascinations of class: we half-relish their snobbery and élitism, half-revel in the righteous disdain these provoke. All this is a matter of broad cultural psychology, and complaining about it is like carping at the current placings in the pop charts – harmless, but pretty ...”

“... son of an ancient noble family, but his club foot kept him from the military vocation of his class, and led his parents to treat him with even more indifference than French aristocrats ordinarily showed their children. In his memoirs, he recounted that an uncle was shocked to find him, alone and in rags, chasing sparrows, and took him to an elegant house ...”

“... daily routine, from the morning Swedish drill and ‘experimental breakfasts’ through to tugs of war, convivial country dancing and 11 p.m. lights out. While for Gibbs, they’re all about flirtations with Fabian flappers. Unsurprisingly, his belief that Shaw’s personal life and passions are a more secure clue to his life than his convictions leads Gibbs ...”

“... the novel’s account of the emergence of 20th-century feminisms at once within and against the class and gender constraints prevalent in 1880. Its final section, Woolf noted in her diary, would need to be as weighty as its first, and ‘must in fact give the other side, the submerged side of that’. Trevelyan, by contrast, remained a stranger to ...”

“... In the late 1930s the Surrealists agitated directly against French neutrality in the Spanish Civil War as well as opposing homegrown fascist movements like Action Française and Croix-de-Feu, which called for the deportation of all aliens. Their texts of protest didn’t hold back in their use of such labels as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘totalitarian’. By ...”

“... that Bainbridge recalled in A Quiet Life (1976). Winnie was part of a generation of middle-class women who had been taught that finding the right husband would guarantee a secure status. She never came to terms with the sense that she had been cheated.Though money was tight, there was a substantial house, a car, a telephone and regular ...”