“... Douglas-ScottWe​ learned soon after his victory that the new prime minister has convened a ‘war cabinet’ to prepare for Brexit. Yet the only war is the one Britain has declared on itself. Let us be clear what a no deal Brexit is likely to involve: food shortages; immobile freight traffic at Dover; medicine shortages ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”