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“... 1945 Election (to which he makes only a passing reference), he insists that the mass of working-class voters are not, and never were, interested in socialism. In a vitriolic obituary he asserts that ‘hardly anyone who joins the party or works within it does so any longer as part of a commitment to a cause greater than their own individual interest.’ Nor ...”

“... be allowed to pay for one’s sin or mistake by seppuku was an honour reserved for the privileged class, the mercy of a samurai to another samurai. A scene of seppuku on a Kabuki stage, immaculately white everywhere and every detail as rigorously and sensitively controlled as in a tea ceremony, has never disgusted a Japanese audience: on the contrary, it ...”

“... before most British academics had heard of such things. Came 1971. Came world-wide recession. Came war and pillaging troops (who mercifully couldn’t read and left the books). The Halls which had once had High Tables were wrecked. The lawns remained green, but no croquet or cricket was played. Now academics who suffer from low salaries, high inflation, set ...”

“... critic, as Bayley sometimes calls him, has no time for the idea that authors do not exist, or that War and Peace is about literariness rather than life, or that the criticism of Geoffrey Hartman or Paul de Man is poetry to be read alongside Byron and Blake, or that literature, as a function of class oppression, is a burden ...”

“... trusted enough to be given the majority in Parliament which every Conservative leader since the war has at one time or another enjoyed, and slipping back into policies which a cowed Parliamentary Party may be unable to influence – the reflex kick of the politically dispossessed. In opposition, Mitchell writes, ‘we alienate support by appearing ...”

“... one largely buttressed by memory, seemed a surer prophylactic against social revolution than a class one. And the memories of the caste system, on both sides, kept the iron in the soul where it belonged. In the concrete, Dr McDowell is firm enough on the implications of Catholic disabilities, but certain of his more abstract remarks seem strangely remote ...”

“... not on account of her ‘charming, improbable romances for initiated persons of the optimistic class’, but of her life and ideas. Consistent ideas and consistent feminism are the last things to be found in Sand’s work, and she was willing to admit it. But if only as an introduction to a sacred monster of Romanticism these two books of translation are ...”

“... which Ladurie indicates appear in many guises throughout the whole Langlandian tradition. ‘Bee war of gyle in borough,’ says the doggerel of John Ball in 1381. The peasants of Hurepoix – who saw their share of the land inexorably reduced by town buyers, from 40 per cent to around a quarter in the century after 1550 – could have had ‘gyle in ...”

“... with such descriptions is that they tend to be written by people from whom Turner was separated by class and education. They create the picture of him as a Dickensian grotesque, and there is nothing from his own hand to balance the record. His poetry and theoretical writing on art are obscure, his notes to his father dealing with such practicalities as buying ...”

“... severely restricted. For a young black girl in Nyeri, in the years just following the First World War, the choice is stark and simple: ‘picking coffee or looking after men’. Since picking coffee is the way of ‘choosing for yourself’, Wairimu picks coffee, an independence that ensures her fifty years bent double on the white man’s plantations. When ...”

“... or originality. The cold-shouldering of the aristocratic Baronne de Staël by the (at best) middle-class Burney père and fille is reflected in the novel, as is the more pointed and hurtful shunning of her at one of the Parisian salons. Even in France, even among the aristocrats of the Ancien Régime – where more leeway was allowed in sexual behaviour than ...”

“... Despite his exotic name, Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an upper-class Englishman of the kind who seem to float on a cloud of contentment, perpetually entertained by the oafish antics of the rest of us down below. His press release describes him as ‘a member of the Modern History Faculty of Oxford University’ and Millennium, his blockbuster on the history of the world, as a ‘highly acclaimed’ bestseller, while translations of his monographs and reference books are ‘pending in twenty languages ...”

“... than any other in the EU looked reasonable enough. It was a boast no other government in the post-war period had been able to make and it would have been taken as axiomatic that any government that could make such a claim would be the safest of shoo-ins. Yet Labour, which had taken a lead in the polls in late 1992, never lost it thereafter and always looked ...”

“... excelled at dividing the opposition, and there are already signs of cracks, particularly along class lines. Thousands of workers in critical industries are still on strike, in defiance of the Supreme Council. Nerves may have been calmed when the army first intervened, but poorer Egyptians may be looking for a more far-reaching set of transformations than ...”

“... portions of An American Childhood) the butterfly is not an anonymous member of an order within the class Insecta but a particular creature who, having had the particularly bad luck to have emerged from its chrysalis in a schoolteacher’s glass jar and so lost the chance to unfurl its wings while they were still capable of unfurling, nevertheless set off ...”