“... influence, resulting in numerous comical episodes. ‘Likely lad’: n. (b) British a working-class young man; a young man with characteristics stereotypically associated with the working class. (OED) Hill has been very well served by the excellent Kenneth Haynes, who saw both his prose and his poetry into the ...”

“... or publishers and readers, were elsewhere. All three cities remained untouched by the Second World War; they were not bombed, nor were they transformed by reconstruction when the war ended. Even in the 1980s and 1990s it was possible to walk around many parts of these cities and notice that nothing much had changed for ...”

“... also is trying to be life.’ Who will triumph? That is ‘the present quiet civil war in England’ which Hughes mentions at one point to Faas, a pervasive and unfinished conflict of which he regarded the First World War, oddly, as merely a local episode – rather as Blake saw the French Revolution as a ...”

“... It!’, where he owns up to being eaten alive by a needy appetite for acclaim and a first-class upgrade. ‘Throughout the jumping metropolis of New York one sees vertical fanaticism, the Thor-type upward thrust of the entire being … the man or woman who is High Inside, hummingly self-aware … watching out for number one with a hundred new-born ...”

“... was a rich Conservative MP called Victor Cazalet who helped the family live a more upper-middle-class existence than they would otherwise have been able to afford. When she was three, Cazalet gave Elizabeth a pony called Betty. Riding Betty prepared her for the role of Velvet in National Velvet, but it was also, as Brower writes, ‘the only time she was ...”

“... arranged life of the senses’. All three enjoyed the frank and gilded perquisites of money and class. Even the fashion writer Madge Garland, embarrassed by her provincial Australian roots and the only one of the three who really had to work for a living, might be described as aristocratic-by-default, in the same contingent and self-legislating way that ...”

“... and Jack London, ever since he’d read Pierre, or The Ambiguities as a teenager. He ‘made the war’ with his new name, and by the time it was over so many people knew him as Melville that there was no question of going back to Grumbach. Even Melville found himself getting confused: ‘I forget that when I say Melville, it’s not me.’ Yet Melville did ...”

“... home by his father, who had served as a police officer for the British in Hong Kong during World War Two. In 1945 my grandfather returned to the small feeder village in the north-west district of Punjab where, tall and stentorian, he owned much land and was deferred to by the local community. Even village hoolies bantering and mischiefing on dusty track ...”

“... she met John Churchill, a professional soldier and adventurer. Both came from the declining gentry class which had been hard hit by the disruptions of the civil wars. Both possessed almost startling physical beauty. And both of them were deeply emotional, highly-strung, acutely ambitious, and resolutely on the make. In 1677, they were secretly married. The ...”

“... served over a year in a psychiatric hospital for possessing a copy of Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, was about to go to the camps for protesting against the arrest of Alexander Ginsburg. Yevtushenko is much concerned with his reputation, but that he should be so admiring of a wealthy woman for submitting herself to the horrors of washing her own stockings ...”

“... have been a portrait into a long obeisance. When Pinter writes a truly dire poem about the Gulf War, the sort of rant you would have to turn down for the school magazine, and which was refused by the Independent, the Observer, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and (surely not) the London Review of Books, Billington not only prints and defends the ...”

“... eruption of youthful insubordination in 1968 seemed to go beyond barriers of language, culture and class. Today, almost thirty years later, one is struck not only by the homogeneity of the movement, but also by the diversity of the traces it left behind in different countries. In Germany, for example, the effects of 1968 (or so it seems to a foreigner) were ...”

“... shock. During the 1970s several thousand Chinese technicians built the world’s biggest post-war railway between Tanzania and Zambia. The achievement is not nullified by niggling later criticisms of embankments being too narrow or locomotives too weak, but it has to be qualified by the enormous difficulty China had in creating a corps of Africans capable ...”

“... allegiance to the UK. For unexpectedly this has turned out to be a khaki election, with the war in Kosovo dominating headlines in the Scottish press. Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, who spoke out against the Nato action as ‘an unpardonable folly’, not only found himself denounced by Robin Cook as ‘the toast of Belgrade’, but also saw both his ...”

“... Wind, when wilt thou blow’: we all assumed that this was the kind of thing we should be doing in class. Bateson went pretty directly to the poem; he didn’t examine the referential claims of language, the validity of literature as an institution, the university as an instrument of power, the authority of a literary canon, male domination in English ...”