“... of the British Parliamentary élite which made very evident both the decline of direct working-class representation among Labour MPs and the rise of an upwardly mobile middle class. As I ploughed through one biography after another, however, I became painfully aware of the generational limits to mobility. The perfect ...”

“... and cultural change. One reads so often of the gloom and despondency of the British after the war that it is heartening to be told that they were probably enjoying themselves as never before. Detachment leads on to revisions. Morgan is a revisionist in several directions, not least in reshuffling the well-thumbed pack of ministerial reputations. In recent ...”

“... answer is that the Bush administration draws its political support not from America’s corporate class generally, but rather from a particular part of it: ‘the sprawling disaster capitalism complex’. She has in mind the companies that reap huge profits from catastrophes, both man-made and natural. They include defence contractors, arms dealers, high-tech ...”

“... go with the food. He ends by wrapping the lot in a newspaper and bolting. Bevin completely lacked class-consciousness – in the crabbed sense of the term, though he took a natural pride in his humble origins. He once told his Private Secretary’s wife that he used to collect washing from her mother’s house. Nobody dreamt of disapproving of him, and the ...”

“... than they have been before. Two thirds of the novel is set around the Black Sea during the Crimean War, and the chaotic conditions in the camps there, as well as the number of people Bainbridge suggests travelled out for reasons other than actual fighting, mean that there’s more scope for chance to seem to have a dominant role. The plot, especially in its ...”

“... Last month, two days after the war on the Reef between Inkatha and the ANC erupted in Soweto, the families in Klipspruit Extension were moving out. The windows had been smashed in every single house on the dusty road through this respectable, middle-class development. Dozens of well-dressed middle-class Sowetans were loading mattresses, tables, cushions, chairs and pictures onto pick-up trucks and roof racks ...”

“... against the moral perils of a market economy. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963, was ‘surely the most widely read and most influential work of history published in English during the 20th century’. Thompson, like Tawney, lamented the social destruction wreaked by the free market, in his case during the Industrial ...”

“... grasp of what’s happening in the country. When his uncle asks, ‘You have heard that there is war in Eastern Region, abi?’ he shakes his head. He’s a lonely, ‘hermitic’ sort of boy. Since his transistor radio ran out of batteries, he hasn’t kept up with current events. Now term is over there’s no excuse for him not to visit his parents, who ...”

“... to be taken foremost) is A Sort of Clowning by Richard Hoggart, perhaps the most usefully class-conscious English writer of our time. He created an accepted general idea of the British ‘working class’ in 1957, with The Uses of Literacy. He developed his concept, most recently, in his memoir, A Local ...”

“... Britons on the home front in the Second World War bore the sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing, which were intended to constrain the demand for precious consumables, ensure their quality and allow them to be shared out equally ...”

“... informs us – he is rather keen on such things – his subject learned about ‘the English class system’; it may be added that he learned by the usual method of noticing those who were richer than himself rather than by being enlightened as to the advantages he himself enjoyed. When war broke out in 1914, he was in ...”

“... gnawing hunger.I imagine Emma Griffin chose to open her engaging history of 19th-century working-class family economics with the story of the O’Mearas because it suggests what was structural and inescapable about their trajectory but also what was a consequence of personality and luck. The labour market and the wage system were both structured by ...”

“... British economy. It was probably the worst mistake in British public policy since the Second World War yet not one of those responsible – ministers or civil servants – ever accepted responsibility, let alone thought of resigning, an insouciance inconceivable a generation earlier. It is now even easier to duck political responsibility because ministers ...”

“... survey also identifies those sections of the community whose views are most resistant in terms of class (working), sex (male) and age (over 55). But it shows that there is not always a correlation between attitudes and behaviour: while healthy eating habits seem to be associated with women at all levels, they also increase generally with age. To put it ...”

“... ensure peace by demonstrating the sheer inutility of anger, and the violent passions that lead to war will atrophy. Writing on the cusp of the era of neoliberal globalisation, Hirschman could have had little idea that these same arguments were going to be repeated uncritically for the next forty years. But he sounded a note of caution even so. These may have ...”