“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are by no means so immediate or so existential. Meanwhile, the character of the oppositions at war here changes dramatically as one moves from one level or context to another: the natural law universalism of Habermas and his followers, which can embody an Enlightenment stance against superstition and tyranny, suddenly looks rather different when it is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... also egalitarian, enabling anyone with a good eye and time on their hands to contribute. An elite class of volunteers would arrange completed slips into bundles for pre-sorting (both by chronology and into senses of meaning), before Murray’s Scriptorium staff embarked on the business of turning slip bundles into referenced definitions.Ogilvie herself ...”

“... world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle America, usually with disappointed middle-class lives, underwhelming husbands and dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. None of that mattered – because they were witty, always having conversations I wished I was part of. But, as with rewatching a show that seemed brilliant at the time, when ...”

“... liberalism not with international socialism, but with a corporatist organisation that would soothe class conflicts and rid society of Jewish power. The word Antisemitismus had been coined by a German radical, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879, and arguably the first modern pogrom had taken place in Ukraine in 1881. But the new strand of thought gained ideological ...”

“... known as Chicklit, those pink-liveried multi-platformed entertainments in which young middle-class women seek love and fortune in the big, big city – the dreamworld of Melissa Bank (a Moore follower if ever there was one) and Sex and the City and Bridget Jones. Except that Self-Help also now reads like a self-consciously historical document, a John Dos ...”

“... become extinct, that of the self-made scientist. He grew up in a shabby-genteel lower-middle-class family in Coventry, a family whose straitened circumstances forced him to leave school and earn a living as soon as possible. Aged thirteen, he became a medical apprentice to his brother-in-law in London, a dogsbody role in what was at that time not always ...”