“... ones), or any other group to which the victim of the syndrome happens to belong (e.g. middle-class homeowners with tax-deductible mortgage interest payments), but in any case fatally destructive of character and self-respect when given to the poor; and 3. the delusion that Adam Smith propounded any such beliefs – i.e. that his ‘invisible ...”

“... international, for his choice. After a spell performing the civic functions expected of one of his class, he succeeded in 1679 in joining a Venetian embassy to the Sultan in Istanbul. His first encounter with the Ottoman Empire excited his interest, and was to lay the foundations for a literary project which, decades later, would result in the publication of ...”

“... James Whale was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, in 1889, the sixth of seven children in a working-class family. He served in the Great War, and was imprisoned by the Germans. He acted, designed, stage-managed and directed in the theatre in London in the Twenties, but it was all fairly desultory until he took on ...”

“... is to keep us waiting for the confirmation and the details. Meanwhile Kate sheds her middle-class identity, leaves Sydney, and travels somewhere on that line through and beyond Dubbo to Narromine, Trangie, Nevertire, Mullengudgery and finally Myambagh, where she eats a great deal of white bread and steak, works as a barmaid, and becomes involved with ...”

“... of Zyklon B to Saddam Hussein. What a Carve Up! ends as Number 11 begins, with Britain wading into war in Iraq. The Winshaws don’t make many appearances in Number 11, but rather like the ghost of David Kelly they haunt its edges. Britain’s depressed condition is shown to be a consequence of policies that they had a hand in – or, more precisely, of an ...”

“... is 16 years old, of small stature, and has a yellowish complexion and short curly hair.’ With war between Denmark and Britain looming, she suspected he had run off to join the militia. Eleven years later, and more than a thousand miles across the sea, a surveyor carrying out a study of the Icelandic coast for the Danish government was guided through the ...”

“... from Rowland Road and indicates that one should stand up. ‘What do you want to do after 12th class?’ he says. ‘I want to be an artist,’ says Raju. ‘Very beautiful,’ says the President. ‘And you?’ Abdul stands up. ‘I want to be an engineer,’ he says. ‘Whatever character is there,’ says the President, ‘whatever condition, the ...”

“... made phosgene, one of the nastier gases developed and used by the German Army in the First World War. One of my sources claimed that the phosgene stocked in Toulouse could not have had a wholly non-military use (I was never able to verify this rumour). It was stored in a large underground chamber across the river from the factory, and even closer to the city ...”

“... be the first piece of French homework Charlotte had written for Heger, lost since the First World War. Early in February 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, then aged 25 and 23, went to Brussels to board at the pensionnat run by Claire Zoë Parent on the long since demolished rue Isabelle. The sisters went to Belgium to complete their education, in the hope ...”

“... Become a junkie’s moll, a psychiatric inmate, a teacher trying to get the attention of a class of adolescents eight times a day, a parent, a writer – all of it, after a short while, is just what you happen to be doing. Habit, arguably, is more powerful than liking or hating your circumstances. You get used to everything in the end. I know only one ...”

“... warns against overdetermining these poems about the ‘rat-coloured igloos of the Northern working class’. If he ‘didn’t get anywhere near to understanding the politics and poetry of the people and houses around me … A reason for this could be that they didn’t have any.’ A large dose of wary detachment, then, has always coexisted in Dunn with the ...”

“... Rivers baby begins to cry. I’d be interested to know whether it was Moore’s implication that class divisions can outweigh the shared bonds of motherhood that led Virginia Woolf to describe Esther Waters as ‘this novel without a heroine’, as if she doubted that servants were a proper subject for serious literary representation. Moore was certainly one ...”

“... of wealth and poverty unknown in other regions. The free economy of small farmers and a merchant class with a few grandees and many more ambitious shopkeepers produced less dramatic results. American farmers sought a decent ‘competence’ that would sustain both themselves and their children; they produced modest surpluses for the market, but did most of ...”

“... of Spark’s life has a certain archetypal appeal, its trajectory being from a lower-middle-class childhood in Edinburgh, ‘half in, half out of the Edinburgh Jewish community’, to fame and fortune in middle life. On the way, there was a failed marriage which led to a barren wartime sojourn in Africa, and a son from whom she was often ...”

“... to discuss the classic example, Tolstoy, and his supposed decline from the panoramic vitality of War and Peace to the ‘aridity of the late short fiction’. Yet to the author himself, JC suggests, the evolution must have seemed very different: ‘Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to ...”