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“... sector to supplement their incomes, but the rewards are disappointing. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War who drove me into town one evening described the situation in his village: ‘My mother is fine because she is stingy and things are still cheap there, but what do I get by moving to the city? I fought at the front for six years, but now there are no houses ...”

“... analysis, rather than a centrifugal one that might splatter their content onto the wider world of class, gender or ethnic particularism. It helps that the gamer’s proxy is always on a quest – for money, gold, any token that may have valuta if not intrinsic value. The numbers it’s necessary to lay waste to en route to these trinkets inflate according to ...”

“... or time’. He finds it strangely bracing to eat in a restaurant built over a Civil War mass grave, ‘as if the dead boys dancing with death had built it just for him 135 years later in a flush Vicksburg, very wide and rolling’. He hates nature, ‘wishing more of it was a rug and smelled like new cars’. Most of all, he’s profoundly ...”

“... imposed way of behaviour,’ their grandson Rhodri recalled. ‘“We’re both very nice middle-class artists, and I’m a vicar.” It was impossible to be relaxed about them, they weren’t normal, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be relaxed. So there were these huge silences . . . But small talk was vulgar. And a lot of life is vulgar.’ Parish ...”

“... turbines, have fled Baghdad for fear of being kidnapped. The walls of al-Iskan, the lower-middle-class district where Musak lives, are covered in slogans supporting the resistance. Musak explained: ‘A few weeks ago a man, nobody knows who, shot at a helicopter with his Kalashnikov. The helicopter fired two rockets in return. They hit the tent where a ...”

“... Office rated it as a tropical posting and, until the advent of air-conditioning, the political class had evacuated the former swamp between June and September. In her readable, if modular, account of how air-conditioning in the United States evolved from a novelty to a luxury, to a necessity, to a right, Marsha Ackermann devotes a chapter to cooling creep ...”

“... annihilation’ practised by the author’s mother – could stand as a vindication of upper-class belief in character. The author has not moved far from her family, geographically or socially, but she has led an independent life. This family is one of maids and mansions, and of neighbours who, when quizzed abroad about their occupation, explain: Moi, je ...”

“... having graduated from a number of Boston’s finest mental establishments and finally, with the class of 1973, becoming an alumna of McLean Hospital, alma mater of Lowell and Plath. Wherever she went there were flings and affairs, behaviour expected of course from male poets on the circuit, but scandalous when the poet was a woman. ‘Wow! I’ve kissed ...”

“... Ethiopian. Alan McClaurin looks back at himself as a young man in flight, first, from the Vietnam War and the draft, and then later, in 1971, when, ‘dreaming of solitude and inviting my soul’, he returns to the country where he grew up. Not the least of Douglas’s successes is the way she casts at least provisional doubt on both the soul and the judgment ...”

“... by the system of democratic pluralism. Shafarevich’s great concern is that these Cold War clichés have penetrated modern Russian culture. Under their influence, he contends, Russia’s contemporary poets and balladeers preach the message that the Russian people are ‘beasts with human faces’ and that ‘it is impossible to live honourably ...”

“... of another link between ritual and power beyond mere legitimation. Harm to the king’s body in war was said to demoralise soldiers and to bring defeat: ‘Disorder in the body entailed disorder in the reign.’ But when land and labour became subject to market forces, so the author tells us, royal control diminished. Contributions by two anthropologists ...”

“... is a Jewish refugee, who escaped from Germany with his mother, just before the outbreak of World War Two, so that the novel takes in Germany, Los Angeles, Mexico, and the North and South of England. On both sides of the Atlantic, privilege is set against poverty; council estates in London confront the gaudy affluence of Willy’s Mexican villa, as well as a ...”

“... by their secrecy as spies; by sexual secrecy; and by the previously hidden life of a ruling class that excluded the rest of society from its secret garden. This rage of discovery is equalled by the obsession of people in charge to keep things secret, not simply with regard to espionage – something that is hardly surprising, particularly if one’s ...”

“... are one of the New England families and much of the book’s appeal is in watching all that class (and, though less important, all that money) getting dirtied up by low types like Warhol and his spooky entourage, by drugs, madness, sex etc. Not only did Edie herself die at a thrillingly young age, but there were also two Sedgwick brothers who went mad ...”

“... other recent stories with elderly protagonists, it also quietly charts collisions of period and class, and shows a keen, wry sense of the displacements worked by social change and old age. Sidney’s understanding is as limited as his vocabulary, which is a small, painfully unreliable work-force, fit for few jobs; Mrs Bittell’s head is ‘clouded by ...”