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“... and I are about the same age – our middle fifties. We were both just young enough to miss the war, for which we used to give many thanks. Fighting for the Germans against the Russians, and then changing ends and fighting for the Russians against the Germans was not particularly pleasant by all accounts. The bullets could come from either direction, or ...”

“... before California, have not appreciated what they’ve had. The sense of malaise since World War Two, insofar as it has percolated beyond small circles of intellectuals, has come less from real failure than from the English forgetting who they are and who they are not. Dr Allison portrays the confused events of the later Seventies with positive ...”

“... belief that Tarot is an ancient form of cartomancy dates, in the main, from after the Second World War. This very recent efflorescence seems to be the result of some skilful operations in the publishing trade which Dummett understandably dismisses as unworthy of consideration. I have only one comment to make on the history side of the argument. This is a point ...”

“... By the 1960s it had sold more than a million copies. Only in the aftermath of the Second World War did academic historians begin to share the Quennells’ preoccupation with ‘everyday things’. The change owed something to postwar consumerism, which generated an interest among economic historians in the history of goods and their consumption. The study ...”

“... he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics; he spent the last year of the war in the Intelligence Corps, working at the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi. A child of Empire, then, and beneficiary of all the privileges bestowed by an élite education; his family was wealthy, his mother a South African scion of wool and whisky. But ...”

“... where brave people in khaki could come and bear witness.’ As the child of enterprising middle-class parents (his mother owned a hair salon in Nakuru, his golf-playing father was the managing director of Pyrethrum Board of Kenya, a farmers’ marketing co-operative), Wainaina was dismayed not to find his own day-to-day experience reflected in most ...”

“... entitled ‘Window Imagery in the Later Pasternak’, while in the theoretico-political 1970s, ‘Class Struggle in The Divine Comedy’ was a more predictable topic. By the 1980s and 1990s, conference papers with titles like ‘Putting the Anus back into Coriolanus’ had arrived on the scene. The shift from class struggle ...”

“... flourishing, realising your historically-bred powers and capacities to the full. It is this which class-society forestalls, and what it forestalls it with, among other weapons, is morality. Freud would later identify moral ideology, or the superego, as a kind of sickness, a frenzied sadistic idealism which drives us to self-destruction in the name of ...”

“... she spent much of her first marriage. And they are rich in local detail, tags of both place and class: the brave and faded dignity of Mr McCauley, who dressed for business every day, despite the fact that there was no business to be done, and who, having ‘walked everywhere’ during the war ‘to set an ...”

“... co-ordinates in a sociology of readership. Britain, the story goes, developed an extensive middle-class readership earlier than other countries. These new consumers of print wanted to read about themselves, in intricate circumstantial detail, and to know that all over the nation others like them were doing the same. The novel thus became at once the ...”

“... as much as left – seemed to lead to mass extermination or indoctrination. Tocqueville’s Cold War appeal did nothing to dent his standing in the United States, where his Democracy in America is one of the two unchallenged classics of American political theory, the other being The Federalist Papers. Name recognition within the American political elite has ...”

“... duty: the first task – ‘the full and proper office of the critic’ – was to judge, to ‘class and value’ literary works; the second was to give a ‘tolerably instructed person’ with no experience of the original a reliable idea of what it was like. Saintsbury knew how to do that with poetry, plays and novels, but there were few patterns then ...”

“... of aerial photographs from the US Geological Survey that he uncovered after the start of the Iraq War; they impelled him to fill in the blank spots on the maps, to register the black sites somehow. Thus Limit Telephotography (2005-present), his series of photographs of remote surveillance systems and clandestine military operations taken with high-powered ...”

“... could be straight from Paul Mendez’s first novel, Rainbow Milk, which examines issues of race, class and sexual identity through the prism of millennial culture. About a third of the way through the book, its protagonist, Jesse McCarthy, summons the courage to enter a gay bar by invoking the sassiness of a member of the Sugababes: ‘He wanted to feel like ...”

“... in the claustrophobic rooms of a long-ago commonsense Englishness, with its petty snobberies and class anxieties, its put-downs (that ‘calm sureness … wasn’t bred in any charity school’), its antisemitism (‘the pliant philosophy of a race long used to lying low’), its parades of snooty know-how (‘Wigmore Street’s clients do not stay in town ...”