“... in Vienna jumped from fewer than four thousand in 1848 to 175,000 on the eve of the First World War. It’s important not to underestimate the impact of small elites of the wealthy and educated – of the 405 Jewish families in early 19th-century Berlin, say. Pre-democratic liberal societies were constructed for the benefit of such groups. Thus the Italian ...”

“... But the recollections of people who came into the City before or not long after the Second World War leave a consistent impression of a system which worked rather well. It really did seem (or so I’ve been told by people who remember it) like a club – for men only, needless to say. The club’s veteran members were assumed to know what they needed to know ...”

“... that was revealed in the Brexit vote has been given the chance to deepen while the political class has been stuck trying to deliver on the change the Brexit vote called for. The government may be anticipating some gratitude if and when it fulfils the mission the electorate set for it. The electorate may have other ideas. Perhaps an entire political order ...”

“... middling ministers. There has been a substantial increase in the number of female MPs. Since the war there has always been a handful of formidable female MPs – Barbara Castle, Bessie Braddock, Margaret Thatcher, Gwyneth Dunwoody – but never enough to change the boys’ club culture. It was not until the Blair revolution of 1997, which saw the election of ...”

“... in murder’.Unlike in other parts of West Africa, frustration with the political class is tempered by a belief in due process. The coup was met with greater enthusiasm in Mali, which borders Burkina to the north. Mali has been run by a military junta since a coup in August 2020. Sanctions, including border closures, were brought against it ...”

“... general feeling was that America was getting what it deserved: ‘Since the beginning of the Cold War, the United States has engaged in colour revolutions in other countries, incited unrest, caused uprisings, and now it has finally hit itself.’In the years since his visit to the US, Wang has risen to the top of the Chinese Communist Party. His official ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... classes from which they come’. Cukor is arguing with Veblen’s demeaning Theory of the Leisure Class. He is inviting us to an altogether more elevating conversation between C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (There is, as Cavell nicely describes it, a raging ‘thirst for talk’ in all these films.) We are hearing about the ...”

“... German people have still not faced up to the full truth: ‘in spite of everything, the war is still unexplained’). Her capacity to register the felt experience transcends the programmatic bent of her fiction. Which is exactly what you can’t say about Heinrich Böll. His journalistic sense of public life has always threatened to circumscribe his ...”

“... one seems to have contemplated the problems of the future. Can we really maintain for good a first-class base at the other end of the world? And if we can do this, is it worth doing? As the questions pile one on another, the wisest course is to cease these speculations and leave events to decide the future fate of the Falkland Islands. This is what I intend to ...”

“... 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 ...”