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“... they can evoke the Wild West. After a rain-heavy winter, the mud is more reminiscent of Civil War Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.For more than a hundred years, tourism has been nurtured by annual events designed to attract visitors while amusing the locals. In the 1920s, the Sark Regatta provided a day of swimming, diving, pillow fights and greasy pole ...”

“... the normalisation of the far right has been advancing for decades. Italy after the Second World War had a unique political landscape. It was home to both the most powerful communist party in Western Europe and the most successful right-wing parties that openly identified with a fascist forebear. Communists were always excluded from power at national ...”

“... and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as Czechoslovakia’s most important dissident – when a potential rival emerged, doubtful ...”

“... the torch at midnight. The most celebrated (and photographed) visitors to I Tatti in the post-war period included such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was ...”

“... to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context. And there is ...”

“... on settings of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ and the spine-chilling Lyke Wake Dirge, or in the War Requiem, where the point of greatest expressive intensity is felt less in the generalised terrors of the Dies Irae than in the private eeriness of the setting of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped/Down some profound dull ...”

“... to unlimited revolutionary consequences. It would be easy to write this off as a case of governing-class paranoia; but though Burke may have had a paranoid personality, Gibbon did not, and in Lausanne he was out of touch with English collective opinion. We need to take account of the rapidity with which the Revolution convinced observers that they were living ...”

“... immigrant child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How ...”

“... and the city are fields, vastly enlarged since mechanised farming came in after the Second World War, mostly arable (wheat, barley, oilseed rape), with one big dairy farm, a member of an organic milk co-operative that is under contract to Dairy Crest PLC. The redundant farmhouses, stripped of all their surrounding land except pony-sized paddocks, are owned ...”

“... Césaire’s view of Martinique was a product of his birth into the island’s small Black middle class, distinct from its mixed-race (Mulâtre) and White middle classes. His parents – Fernand, the manager of a sugar plantation, and Eléonore, a seamstress – saw education as a route to social mobility. Fernand subjected his children to a strict regime of ...”

“... now so dire as to be unignorable. The combined effects of the financial crisis, Brexit, Covid and war in Ukraine have resulted in economic conditions far graver than those on which McKinsey was consulted at the end of the 1990s. This reality can no longer be papered over with a successful financial services sector, discrete acts of redistribution or the ...”

“... his art. Critics have been more bleakly faithful both to materialist philosophy and to any future class-free utopia when they have considered all would-be revolutionary art as itself marked by the contradictions of class society (including socialism, which in classical Marxism is not the absence of social classes but the ...”

“... as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an ...”

“... 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the rich, and idolised by the poor. But your second administration was dogged by accusations of violence and corruption. Although you remained the most popular politician among the electorate, you appeared to have lost much of ...”

“... in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy ...”