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“... Anthony Sampson in The Changing Anatomy of Britain quotes Lord Denning dismissing attacks on a class-based judiciary: ‘The youngsters believe that we come from a narrow background – it’s all nonsense – they get it from that man Griffith.’ Lord Reid was a distinguished top judge. In 1972 he wrote: ‘Those with a taste for fairytales seem to have ...”

“... between Eileen Blair, Orwell’s first wife, and ‘one of his commanders in the Spanish Civil War’ (this was the adventurous Georges Kopp – Crick, who knew the gossip, says ‘she kept him at a comradely distance’). He produces a security police report showing that Orwell escaped the fate of other supporters of POUM only by leaving when he did, and ...”

“... in India, perhaps anywhere, as Rajni Kothari pointed out long ago, are less a direct reflection of class interests or coherent ideologies than ramshackle coalitions competing around the structure and resources of government. Political groupings sometimes seek to gain access to the Government by operating within the Congress, and sometimes, more ...”

“... to her of that other kind of ‘work’, or more accurately, art, which women of the leisured class engaged in: the art of organising domestic ceremonies. In the portrait of Mrs Riddle, tea is represented as a ritual occasion, as part of a feminine rite. It may be that she saw her sitter’s vocation – building a seemly or even an exquisite ...”

“... Those rich thrusters of the Grande Epoque, the self-made men destined to become the new ruling class, come in for expert dissection in The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches by Mordaunt Crook, who is primarily concerned with their architectural tastes. Here we meet not only the men whose millions came from steel, railways and beer, but those who rose on ...”

“... rather absurd’, and of the founders of Cambridge English (seen as carrying on the First World War at the level of theory) as, ‘on the whole, individuals who could be absolved from the crime and guilt of having led working-class Englishmen over the top’. The Function of Criticism adopts a very different ...”

“... in ‘Brooklyn’, where Miss Williams’s accomplishments in her foreign literature night-class, particularly her essay on Gide, provoke her professor into confession and conceit. In ‘Reena’ the narrator meets up with an old friend from her childhood. Reena has thrown over the security of her middle-...”

“... His main bereavement was the loss of his father, who was captured by the Japanese during the war, and killed in an air crash while being repatriated. The book takes as an epigraph the grieving of Andromache in the Iliad: ‘Husband, you are gone so young from life, and leave me in your home a widow. Our child is still but a little fellow, child of ...”

“... only to live and die severed from her true subject-matter, too often dressing it up in middle-class clothes, smoothing its colonial rough edges for her English readers, first and foremost of whom were the Blooms-buries who thought her vulgar. Janet Frame suffered early in life the New Zealand repression in its medical form whereby (as she puts it in her ...”

“... of elaborately vengeful symbolism in which workers taunted their bourgeois masters, mocked middle-class sexuality, and enjoyed Rabelaisian carnival on the margin of a society they resented. The moral of the story doesn’t seem as dramatic as the massacre of the cats, but street-history is bound to show disproportion between actions and their social ...”

“... mainstream and avant-garde alike has a lot to do with his roots in the popular music of pre-war England, particularly his interest in music hall and the musical comedy of Edwardian London. The fascination with music hall is the most palpable link between Grainger and the Kipling of the Barrack-Room Ballads, the Cockney dialect and heavy speech rhythms ...”

“... remained to subscribe. She estimates that from its beginnings in the 1850s down to the First World War, spiritualism attracted, at the very most, a hundred thousand men and women. In the opinion of the proper Victorians who either deplored or ridiculed the movement, it belonged on the lunatic fringe of contemporary society. Today we are inclined to regard it a ...”

“... for ever hidden. This view, I entirely accept. It has been my experience that most middle-class families have some “secret” of this kind in their midst.’ Ivy Compton-Burnett had published ten novels before the 33-year-old Angus Wilson sat down one Sunday and wrote ‘Raspberry Jam’ – to which he then added seven other short stories at ...”

“... less provocative if it did not challenge critical pieties now particularly well-entrenched, about class, gender, and the status of literature. On class, the critical consensus (not only in America) is to see Chaucer as ‘the genial observer of the social scene’ – sympathetic to the working classes like the Miller and ...”

“... Einstein’s life story is almost as well known as his science. He was born in 1879 into a middle-class Jewish family in southern Germany, and went to school in Munich, where he is supposed to have been an unsuccessful pupil and his Greek teacher predicted that he would ‘never amount to anything’. Albrecht Fölsing points out, however, that by 1929 the legend of Einstein’s poor academic record was so widespread that the principal felt obliged to dispel this bad publicity for the school by revealing his (quite respectable) examination marks in a letter to a Munich newspaper ...”