“... down after nearly three decades in power, but on the northern border with Saudi Arabia, the dirty war between Shia Houthi rebels and Salafists is getting nastier. In Libya, the oil companies are doing business again, but the country’s new rulers, swept to power by Nato, are talking about restoring Sharia law, perhaps even polygamy. In Bahrain, a peaceful ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Friends. He was educated in Quaker boarding schools and was a conscientious objector during World War One. He spent periods in the Newcastle Guardroom and Wormwood Scrubs, where he almost certainly took some serious knockings-around. It is a subject he chose thereafter not to discuss. After prison Bunting settled for a time in London. He would be away from ...”

“... force that came to grief in the Süntel hills. In East Germany before 1989, Verden was seen as a class conflict: Saxon aristocrats collaborated with the Franks: those beheaded were peasants. Becher, no Marxist, accepts that in the longer run the Frankish conquest ‘increased the social distance between the nobles and the rest’ of the Saxon population. As ...”

“... mafia … is a system that in Sicily contains and moves the economic and power interests of a class that we can approximately call bourgeois; and it doesn’t arise and develop in the absence of the state (that is, when the state, with its laws and functions, is weak or missing) but inside the state. The mafia, in other words, is nothing other than a ...”

“... yet unexplained’.Buckley made his name as a campus activist. In the lead-up to the Second World War, Yale had been the birthplace of the America First Committee. Dedicated to keeping the British Empire on a short leash and America out of the war, but also to controlling the ‘virgin continent’ of Latin America, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ‘two nations’ trope to describe the position of blacks and Asians as ghettoised, second-class citizens within British society. This theme was taken up in The Satanic Verses with its barely noticed championship of the Asian poor in ‘Mrs Torture’s’ London. Rushdie has described his novels as a ‘migrant’s-eye view of the world’, and his ...”

“... was no Casaubon in that respect – and Francis had to fend him off in ways appropriate to their class and period. A chilly initial submission; the speedy deployment of nervous disorders which made such things out of the question; a planned withdrawal to the South of France for much of the year – these were the stages of expediency, and for good measure ...”

“... a sort of friendship, but as a vast domain of democracy wherein we find gathered people of every class and race and creed, having in pipe or plug or cigar or cigarette, a bond of sympathetic understanding and a contact of common interest and good fellowship. I like to contemplate the business of producing and the pleasure of consuming this exalted plant as ...”

“... of identification. So it appears from all the books about them, and their popularity. The popular class for this fond backward look is the Bourgeois. Once mocked and despised, it now comes retrospectively into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The ...”

“... 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 ...”