“... his destination as 414 West First Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Unfortunately, his third-class ticket was for the Titanic. The other, ‘Hadman E.’, was recorded among the columns of the dead on the King’s Cross war memorial. Heroic efforts by Anna, trips to Kew, Clerkenwell, days trawling the ...”

“... It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record briefings, the supplanting of Brownite X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous accusations from 10 Downing Street of lunacy in Number 11 – while ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National Conservatives’, who are opposed to globalisation in general and the institutions of ‘global governance’ in particular, but are much more likely than populists to praise ‘free ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”