“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”