“... 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 ...”

“... George VI, Churchill and Mountbatten – were all of heroic males intimately associated with war and empire. Diana was the reverse of this, and the kind of mourning associated with them would have been wholly inappropriate for her. Diana stood for the most traditional image of woman. The first to leave flowers, cards and letters were children and they ...”

“... had no choice, shipped off as petty criminals or ‘idle and disorderly persons’, or as civil war prisoners and rebels (this category included the supporters of the Duke of Monmouth in 1685). Banishment was an act of clemency in a legal system where hanging was the standard punishment. Get rid of these miscreants and make them useful elsewhere – that ...”

“... and something feels different. The nationalist triumphalism has dulled with the end of the Cold War. The colours are not as vibrant as you remembered them. Amid the letdown, you may feel called on to provide some compensatory emotion of your own, like the young TV producer in Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, as she contemplates the Rothko ...”

“... among many others the interred remains of Billy Fury; a thousand Dutch servicemen killed in the war; PC Keith Blakelock, who had died in the Broadwater Farm riot the previous year; a former Tory chancellor of the exchequer, Austen Chamberlain; and Mrs Eileen Sheppard’s husband, Harold, who had been buried there at a cost of £1200 22 months earlier. When ...”

“... and readers in Europe. The bulk of published American fiction consists of cookie-cutter, middle-class ‘problem novels’ by tenured academics and their MFA spawn, Dickensian verisimilitude courtesy of Wikipedia (cf Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Safran Foer et al). Something of this retrograde motion warps American criticism as well. Even today, when subjects ...”

“... the SNP their immense victory. Greenock and Inverclyde was one of the very few Scottish working-class constituencies to stay with Labour, but only just: the SNP vote boiled up to come less than 2 per cent behind. At Airdrie and Shotts, in post-industrial Lanarkshire, Alex Neil of the SNP spectacularly broke through to seize the constituency from Labour by a ...”

“... bend and shift sides, working with first the Japanese and then the British during the Second World War; some former allies of Suu Kyi believe there have been moments when compromise from The Lady might have convinced the generals to allow a measure of power-sharing. Burma gained independence in 1948, a year after Aung San’s assassination. In the ...”

“... only three names To be plucked from this dismal set Milton Blake and Shelley Will smash the ruling class yet. Milton had no interest in smashing the ruling class. He had enormous interest in smashing the established Church, but that is not the same thing. Milton wasn’t a Leveller, or a supporter of any of the other ...”

“... of the insolence of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.’ Hurrah! As Elizabeth Einberg puts it, The March of the Guards to Finchley is ‘a work that aims to be both “serious and comic” in the fullest Hogarthian sense’. However reprehensible the behaviour of the grenadiers, the painting permits us to enjoy ...”

“... graduate student – who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two. Ah yes, I see. Greif is, of course, alert to the evaluative-descriptive potential of the label: ‘Hipster accusation has been, for a decade, the outflanking manoeuvre par excellence for competitors ...”

“... expectancy: a 35-year-old man in management can expect to live six years longer than his working-class counterpart; the difference for women is three years; more than 30 per cent of working-class pensioners already suffer from some kind of incapacity when they retire. Macron’s desire to balance the books has also come ...”