“... to say – asserted that she was suffering from ‘uterine disease’, the catch-all for middle-class women whose behaviour was out of line, especially those women who liked men in the way that men like women. Parliament took Edward’s cause to heart and the Divorce Act was amended on his behalf, allowing him to appear as a mere witness rather than a ...”

“... over in the British Library, Marx is making a pig’s ear of the history paper. His analysis of class societies proves ‘flawed’, ‘naive’ and ‘ludicrous’. So what led people to think that these three supposed classics were so marvellous in the first place? Various explanations, such as Myles Burnyeat’s suggestion that a great text lends itself ...”

“... that these people must now eat for us?” So he fell back into talking about the 1970s war against Ian Smith. This meant nothing at all to young people and it addressed none of today’s problems.’ Second, in past elections Zanu-PF had distributed food and seeds to those with a Zanu-PF card: if you didn’t vote Zanu-PF you didn’t eat. ‘But ...”

“... that ‘there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance,’ and who, moreover, ‘hate foreigners, especially if they come from “inferior” races’. The sociological precision of the snobbish anathema is unique ...”

“... man, Banham became, like them, a celebrated outsider – a hit-man turned target. Born in working-class Norwich in 1922, Banham trained to be an aeronautical engineer, but failed the examinations and ditched the profession during the war. After a few years as a local art critic, he left for London in 1949, soon to study ...”

“... who stole from him, or who tried to escape, despite the fact that, fighting in the American Civil War at an earlier stage of his career, he had himself deserted, twice – once from each side. He shot quite a lot of other Africans dead, usually because they objected to his marching through their countries with huge entourages, which made the Africans ...”

“... divine attributes and intentions (‘consider the lilies of the field, how they grow’); middle-class and aristocratic ladies for whom it was a desirable feminine ‘accomplishment’. Then there were the globally distributed worthies who wanted the richness and particularities of their local flora to be formally acknowledged, and who sought personal ...”

“... to remind the public that he had been Khomeini’s prime minister in the ‘heroic days’ of war and revolution. Besides his reputation as a competent administrator, he had nationalised a host of industries, launched a rural construction programme, drafted a progressive labour law, advocated land reform, and introduced wartime price controls and ...”

“... this without finding the secret service, Dreyfus’s superior officers and the former minister of war incompetent or much worse, and they weren’t going to do that. The verdict was rendered on 9 September 1899 and ten days later Dreyfus was formally pardoned for what he had not done. A year later an amnesty was declared that let the conspirators off ...”

“... view ourselves as actors presenting ourselves. So Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few ...”

“... from the state. The gatekeeper would be the doctor providing the sick note.Before the Second World War, sick notes were in widespread use by friendly societies – working-class organisations common in Britain from the late 18th century that offered sickness and funeral benefits to members who made regular contributions to a ...”

“... of the French left, with the humiliation of its two main pillars since the end of the Second World War, the PCF and the PS.From 1945 until the late 1970s, the PCF had dominated left-wing politics in France. Polling between 20 and 25 per cent at legislative elections, it could rely on a dense network of societies and charities aimed at supporting working-...”

“... of the explanation. On the one hand, the stifling parochialism and puritanism of an insular middle-class culture, with all its weight of boredom and repression, made escape abroad an instinctively attractive option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life ...”

“... the pan-European world itself. Political regimes which had built their national logic on the Cold War discovered that the arrangements they had sustained for forty years now seemed pointless, to their voters and to the politicians themselves. Why in Italy have a system of coalitions built around a permanent Christian Democratic majority if there is no Cold ...”

“... chain-gangs and classrooms, of Alaskan lighthouses and Guatemalan churches, or of the US Army’s war against the Modoc Indian tribes. He photographed several multipartite panoramas of San Francisco. He also photographed spectacular arrangements of clouds. Finally, he devoted himself to the many eerily obsessive motion studies of animals, birds and persons ...”