“... stock of itself, to question whether, in an increasingly pluralist society, we needed a middle-class, middlebrow, middle-aged monolith. It did nothing, at that time, other than continue to expand. Having survived this latest report, it will probably again do nothing to change course. The cry will go up from the bridge: ‘Boarders repulsed, steady as she ...”

“... by the splendidly orchestrated publicity surrounding Wheeler’s Maiden Castle dig before the war, and by Wheeler himself, Daniel and latterly Magnus Magnusson on television after it. Archaeology was thus increasingly identified with the special skills of excavation. At the same time, the popularity of the subject led to a burgeoining of university chairs ...”

“... or misery.Arthur Samuels Wolff was born in 1907, the only child of a well-to-do, respected middle-class Jewish doctor in Hartford, Connecticut. He was expelled from a series of first and second-rank private schools, refused by Yale and Princeton, and ended up at the University of Miami, ‘the classic catchall of sun-struck, rich dumbbells’. The courses he ...”

“... new ‘tax state’. He also thought that Roosevelt would take the United States into the coming war in Europe. (‘My dear lady,’ he replied to a woman at a party in 1944 who’d asked whether he favoured the President’s reelection, ‘if Hitler runs for President and Stalin for Vice-President, I shall be happy to vote for that ticket against ...”

“... as a species of boys’ fiction. The book begins in Chicago, towards the end of the Second World War. Paulsen is five. His father went off to war the year his son was born and has never seen him. Paulsen and his mother live alone, and when the mother goes to work an old woman called Clara does the child-minding. This woman ...”

“... should have taken advantage of their temporary occupation of Berlin during the Seven Years War to deport its artisans in order to provide themselves with the rudiments of an industrial working class. He denounced extremes of wealth and poverty – but believed that the role of governments should be purely ...”

“... the populace, the aristocracy and their houses have had to be protected from themselves by middle-class writers, artists and pressure groups. Only very recently has the stately home come to be regarded as integral to the national heritage and identity. In the first, and in some ways the most successful, part of his book, Mandler shows how the initial wave of ...”

“... man whose entire career has been built on passionate ethical commitments, most notably as an anti-war campaigner and advocate of Palestinian rights, and another who seems devoid of a single enduring belief. Corbyn, to be sure, has demonstrated more political acumen, and above all more tenacity, than many would have predicted in the summer of 2015. He has also ...”

“... for me came when David Miliband claimed that they’d been ‘punished enough’ for the Iraq War: ‘Well, you haven’t actually been voted out of office,’ I growled.) The gloom quickly gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little out of love with the idea of electoral reform. Proportional representation is ...”

“... frenzy of capital accumulation, mass production, shiny new technology, depression, hunger and class struggle. By the 1960s, though, a new politics had coalesced around the Vietnam War. The Oppens invested their hopes in a younger generation: radical activists, poets, musicians, hippies, anarchists and students who came ...”

“... Hamann gives us a taste of Klindworth’s opinions: ‘I believe that only a terrible world war can release the tension, and only the most awful misery can bring our people back to prudence and moderation, faith and moral aspiration.’ The defining moment in Winifred’s life occurred in July 1914, when, aged 17, she accompanied Karl Klindworth to ...”

“... essayist, philosopher of religion. He was also a jailbird and redcoat volunteer, flautist and War Office clerk, dandy (blue frock-coat and orange gloves) and sloven among slovens, chronic debtor and philanthropist, vagrant and on-the-spot accoucheur, free love enthusiast and original of Dickens’s Harold Skimpole. The other day he surprised me at ...”

“... unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the English class system and religion, especially the established Church, or at contemporary attitudes to women’s rights, universally welcomed. Still, readers appreciated his evident benevolence, allied to a humour that recalled Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. The titles of ...”

“... into a book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. ‘In the post-Cold War world,’ he wrote there, ‘the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political or economic. They are cultural.’ Refreshingly critical of ‘the West’s universalist pretensions’, Huntington admonished US policy-makers to give ...”

“... should not have made. Second example: disability. An amputee dedicates himself to becoming a world-class athlete and competes successfully in the Paralympics. Or a person born deaf finds the meaning of his life through immersion in the kinds of communication available only to people who lack the ability to hear. The way these people value their lives seems to ...”