“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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-...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”