“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... looks as if the Malorys, father and son, had strong nerves if not reliable loyalties; in a civil war those who will commit themselves to violent action without temporising are especially valuable. Especially, of course, if they are good at it, as Malory’s jailbreak from Colchester would indicate. Field believes that Sir Thomas was released from Lancastrian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... philosopher Harry Marquis. Marquis is a socialist of the old school. A fighter pilot in World War Two, his distinguishing physical feature is a ‘dissident’ thatch of prematurely white hair. A brilliant rhetorician and provocateur of student action, Marquis is a maverick politically, having left the Party in 1956. The founder of Thought and Action, he ...”

“... of 1977. We learn about the composer’s somewhat unbalanced parentage, his educated, middle-class engineer father (the inventor of a circus motor-car prophetically named ‘Le Tourbillon de la Mort’, which crashed in an early test in 1905 and killed its driver), and his Basque mother, the illegitimate daughter of a fisherwoman from Ciboure. Ravel ...”

“... Spanish; was a child of the European wars of religion; was exiled in middle age by a long civil war, and then forced to comprehend not only the execution of Charles I but also the abolition of monarchy; survived to see the restoration of kings, and indeed the royalist Cavendish family, to power; and died the year England seemed to be inexorably slipping ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s irritation with Butterfield be quite so pronounced if he had remembered to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the 20th century. Her first novel, however, the beautiful Return of the Soldier (1918), seemed to class her as what was then called a ‘psychopathological writer’ – with her older friend May Sinclair, who had organised London’s first medico-psychological clinic. The Return is the case-history of an officer invalided home from the trenches. He is an ...”

“... in the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, or by voluntary groups like the Sealed Knot, who enact Civil War battles; the preservation of the built and natural ‘heritage’; the interest in old photographs; and costume drama on stage and screen. On all these subjects Samuel has a torrent of vivid detail and penetrating, if not always well co-ordinated ...”