“... 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 ...”

“... three generations, from the high-water mark of the Victorian age to the eve of the Second World War, the Stracheys were prominent in English life. Noted for their intellect and their boisterousness in argument, and characterised, in most cases, by long limbs and large spectacles, they struck Leonard Woolf as ‘much the most remarkable family I have ever ...”

“... the right. Fleet Street was once a place of genuine human interest. Today, hatred rules. A culture war is taking place in the minds of these editors, not a battle against the bumptious and the piss-taking or even against a few poofs drinking wine, but against an imagined horde of terrorists aiming to plunge your church into darkness or blow up your Tube ...”

“... 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 ...”