“... see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who play the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, ‘Yes, well, that’s only 2 per cent,’ or, as people get richer, 5 per cent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that’s the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small ...”

“... political radicals. In 1962 he joined Ruskin College (in but not of Oxford), a centre for working-class and trade-union education. There, he began increasingly to use primary sources in his teaching: accessing history via secondary literature, he thought, often crushed students’ confidence in their own abilities; examining the original documents was far ...”

“... Sisters, something of a finishing school for young ladies from the East Coast’s upper middle class. At this point, though, Kelley’s thesis (and it is her only one) that Nancy, like her mother, was an all-out social climber begins to falter. For she did not, as might have been expected, use Smith as a gateway to a nice fresh-faced Yalie ...”

“... we do not have any good survey material which would allow us to compare the beliefs of different class and regional groups’; ‘unfortunately, I have no information about membership turnover’; ‘my impression, based solely on those farmers whom I have met, is that supporters of Free Presbyterianism tended to be small to medium farmers with only one or ...”

“... 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 ...”