“... 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 ...”

“... man.’ The news media recently carried the story of a large award of damages made to a working-class family catastrophically overtaken by the negligent diagnosis and treatment of their young daughter. Without legal aid they could not even have contemplated going to the courts for redress. I doubt whether, if contingency fees were permitted, any lawyer ...”

“... mauve, a funny sound, like a cow’s sound.’ Leila Berg was born in Salford, into a lower-middle class family with aspirations. Her mother had been a teacher, but had given up teaching to assume domestic responsibilities. Her father had been a teacher, too, but had pursued medical studies at night school and by her early childhood was registered as a family ...”

“... to process up and down in fancy dress (‘walking’) accompanied by flute bands and 17th-century war drums, but which really exists to maintain the Protestant stranglehold on all financial and professional services within the province and to ensure that however high the rate of unemployment in their community, it’s twice as bad for the Catholics. In Ulster ...”

“... to the broad national good. It will not subordinate this judgment to the interests of one class or another.’ Fair enough, except that Dawson would have argued that he was indeed trying to serve the broad national good. Haley said nothing about subordinating judgment to the views of the proprietor. It has long been accepted wisdom that an editor ...”

“... brought face to face with the weakness of her position (‘He began to realise what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power’). It was not merely that her husband had a criminal record, as she discovered, or that he was involved with a kind of gangster world, or that he was prepared to stoop to anything ...”

“... young lover. ‘I’ve taught him such a lot about wine and things. I’ve really brought him up a class. He’s a good worker too. He manages three or four goes, even after cleaning out the cattery. I breed Siamese.’ Some extras have gone completely mad – the thin line between reality and fiction snapped. They’re usually convincing until you realise ...”

“... and Frederic Raphael, and to be distinguished from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony ...”

“... denouncing money and demanding a sexual revolution: The ordinary Englishman of the educated class goes to a woman now to masturbate himself. Because he is not going for discovery or new connection or progression, but only to repeat upon himself a known reaction.   When this condition arrives, there is always Sodomy. The man goes to the man to repeat ...”

“... gave extra joy by the little documentary touches that recreated the minutiae of life during World War Two. And second, comedy also has an extra appeal – at least for Jonathan Lynn and me – when it is actually about something, in the sense that Butterflies and The Good Life are about something.Johnny and I were writing the first script of Yes, Minister at ...”

“... politics of the capitalist mode of production and, more particularly, of the politically dominant class in the great capitalist nations. And the two do not at all coincide. Liberalism as the governmental form of a capitalist order to some degree systematically violates the sensibilities of liberalism as a form of political culture. The liberal who recognises ...”

“... him as the rabid Führer. Hasenklever, writing on the Eastern Front, had faint hopes that the war would end tyranny; and so his Creon is moved by the deaths, and resigns his power to the people. But 25 years later, in occupied Paris, Anouilh saw no reason to think that the system would ever end; his Creon is polytechnician to the core; the cabinet is more ...”