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“... new festival hall, and holidayed with minor European royalty. But he was himself of solidly middle-class origin, the son of a Lowestoft dentist, and often seemed to care very little about social status, just as long as his orderly days allowed for hours of composition and music-making. He seemed averse to formal politics, yet his life was constituted by ...”

“... of men and women, those whom E.P. Thompson chose to style for this era the ‘English working class’, receive concentrated attention. This format allows Hilton to focus mainly on London and the Home Counties. It also shapes his prime overall argument. Despite the economic, social, demographic, technological, intellectual, political, warlike and imperial ...”

“... that year’s Grand National. The Cliveden set was ridiculed in Reynolds News as a kind of upper-class pro-Hitler cabal. It was felt that the house was becoming a second, covert Foreign Office, with the expertise of civil servants being trounced by cocktail party consensus. ‘For 18 months,’ the paper reported, ‘Cliveden has been the centre of ...”

“... all problems concerning minorities and the stateless’. Thus, she continues, after the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved – namely, by means of a colonised and then conquered territory – but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the ...”

“... him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and so, almost inevitably, he found himself in mid-1940 working for the BBC, first in the Monitoring Service, later in the Chinese section of the Overseas Service. Haffenden’s huge second volume ...”

“... It was in New York, not the Brazilian cerrado, that structural anthropology was born. After the war Lévi-Strauss was in no hurry to go back to France. He’d seen how rough life there was: his parents, who had hidden in the Drôme during the war, were penniless, and his Paris studio had been ransacked. He wasn’t ...”

“... in the hills.By late 1955 a Naga Federal Government had been proclaimed, and a full-scale war for independence had broken out. Under its commander-in-chief, two divisions of the Indian Army and 35 battalions of the paramilitary Assam Rifles, a largely Gurkha force notorious for its cruelties, were dispatched to crush the uprising. As in Malaya and ...”

“... Labour Secretary of State for Industry, echoes the contrast in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham ...”

“... 1906. The currency is the rouble, for Poland is part of the Russian empire, recently disturbed by war with Japan and an abortive revolution. But the Russians are still the ruling class, and Max Barabander’s experiences merge naturally into those of Singer in Love and Exile, who used to wander endlessly with his moribund ...”

“... rather a let-down – that the day’s news from the newspaper, particularly of the Spanish Civil War, furnished the stuff of most of their conversations. You are also aware by now of the cunning with which Canetti is presenting this impersonal person Dr Sonne. As in a screenplay, he has first been glimpsed behind his paper in the Café Museum, a ...”

“... of officials nominated by the Party apparatus has a definite tendency to turn people into a ruling class, exploiting the rest of the people.’ For one of their own to round on them in these terms was unheard of in the seventy years of Communist Party rule, and would have led to her death under Stalin, or to internal exile under his successors. Zaslavskaya’s ...”

“... in the first decade and a half of the century, and again immediately after the First World War, were single people in their late teens and early twenties. They had torn themselves from family and traditional life in Europe. ‘Theirs was a consciousness of the end of all previous history: the end of two thousand years of exile and the end of thousands ...”

“... Polly, was a colonel’s daughter who managed to lose her unsatisfactory spouse in the Great War, and then set up a shop. Her mother was a professional virgin who accumulated fifty proposals, married two pale men, and then made a fortune writing pulp romances. But Raine did best of all. She married the man who was to become her first earl, Gerald ...”

“... hostess, for example, could matter very much in the 18th and 19th centuries: after the Great War she rarely mattered at all. But history is not the purpose of this book. Its selling-point lies in the words of the women themselves, which are arranged under eight categories: early influences, advantages and ...”

“... figures which give such high production value to the façades and interiors of pre-World War One buildings. Then there are his relations with the mistress-models (Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel, Gwen John, Claire de Choiseul and others) whose faces and bodies figure as prominently in his sculpture as their feelings for him did in their lives. And there ...”