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“... On the contrary, it means socialist. Or, to be more precise, intellectual socialist of the middle class, with the various fragments of Aberglaube that adhere to that outlook. Trilling defines the position in several places. Here is one of them: ‘In its political feeling our educated class is predominantly liberal ... I ...”

“... formative experiences were not unusual among English professors of his generation. A working-class grammar school boy from Grimsby, he did his National Service before taking up a scholarship place at Cambridge. His first lecturing post was at the University of Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart ...”

“... is a fair surmise that warriors and would-be warriors, these days more often college-educated, are war-book buyers, of which the Iliad is the echt and ur. Some of course – nasty fellows – would widen the explanation by seeing Americans as a whole as war-lovers, hence war-book ...”

“... spillage of refugees and militias across the border with Liberia (the site of a ruinous, complex war) and a largely homespun insurgency which turned into another, very Kaplanesque war after his departure. In ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Sierra Leone was the paradigm of a Post-Modern badlands, ‘a microcosm of what is ...”

“... mobile reader will identify with it. I suppose, too, that it is just possible there are upper-class readers so articulate and cocooned that they find Harrison’s background exotic in a way comparable to Lowell’s. I doubt it, though. In any case, shouldn’t both hypothetical readers reject that padding ‘all’, even while they reluctantly accept the ...”

“... and anti-Burkeans are far less predictable in ideological terms. At the height of the Cold War, Burke, for instance, proved a combined fountainhead and figurehead for extreme right-wing American ideologues. He was ‘for’ the spirit of ’76 (in actual fact, he was not, but the Cold War did not offer nice ...”

“... in which he sings, because ticket prices don’t cover the costs of staging an opera with a world-class cast. State subsidy of opera is not simply there to pay for one of those things that individuals prefer not to pay for. It is there to provide for individual preferences in a world in which such preferences no longer directly control the finances of ...”

“... the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe.At the end of June, data emerged from the European Commission which appeared to confirm the worst fears ...”

“... It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own’. The ‘fortunate child’ who was given The Hobbit would have no notion of ‘the deep sources in our blood and tradition’ from which the ‘inhabitants’ of ...”

“... more than five years after Gaddafi’s fall in October 2011, Libya has been relegated to that class of countries (Afghanistan, Somalia) from which we hear occasional news of US drone strikes but little else. Gaddafi’s overthrow was quickly followed by a national implosion. The historical divide between Tripolitania in the west and the cities of ...”

“... South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, occupied South-West Africa during the First World War: affinities between European colonial nations trumped wartime animosity. Europeans farmed the fertile areas, while the Indigenous peoples were confined to Bantustans in areas affected by drought. This structure of land ownership remained in place after ...”

“... of duties. You cannot practise citizenship if you are trapped in a despairing and alienated under-class. You cannot govern yourself if you live in an elective dictatorship. One of the reasons why the Hurdian active citizen is a wizened simulacrum of the real thing is that its author could not acknowledge this. If active citizenship on the civic republican ...”

“... have been a welcome visitor to the Flaubert family home. Flaubert and he had been in the same class at school, subjected to the same harsh regimen, and though their social origins and their temperaments were very different, they had shared all the same schoolboy jokes, catchphrases, nicknames, rituals and fantasies. At school Bouilhet was ambitious and ...”

“... world and the traumatic devastations of private and public existence in the First World War will be considered attentively. The narrative mode will be dispassionate, almost Victorian, so as to establish both authority and reticence. It is not, a priori, evident that such a biography, almost necessarily in several volumes (as are its 19th-century ...”

“... Do the spirits teach Socialism?’ asked a working-class spiritualist magazine in 1897. The answer, of course, was yes. In a year which sees the centenary of the establishing of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, it is worth recalling why the Society was founded and who its real enemies were. The last two decades of the 19th century saw a remarkable growth in the general interest in socialism and spiritualism ...”