“... masterpiece Nuer Religion (1956), of which cynics have remarked that it exhibits the Nuer as first-class Jesuit dialecticians. Now, no specialist would want to question the value of these Cairo essays. Though hard to get at in printed form, they were widely circulated in mimeograph for many years. The evidence for development is less obvious. As E-P himself ...”

“... a nine-page appendix illustrating the essence of Leninism. He includes hefty chunks of Lenin on War and Peace, Civil Liberties, Dictatorship and Democracy, giving precise references to his Selected or Collected Works in English and Russian. But he provides no dates, and divorced from his setting in time, Lenin, as a good Marxist, loses almost all of his ...”

“... trying to cheat them. His girlfriend, Candy, wears a skintight yellow jumpsuit to a job-training class, then is devastated when she is told she looks ‘tacky’. Ray wants so desperately to be a real businessman that he even forbids anyone to sell drugs in his social club. But he can’t negotiate the maze of bureaucratic rules and regulations governing new ...”

“... It was a way of participating in high life while rejecting it, which attracted the new reading class, as did the immediacy of the aim. It satisfied a hunger for rituals. Mrs Barbauld rightly pointed out that old ghost and fairy stories had long had the aim of terrifying us pleasurably; but unmasked and stated openly it foreshadowed the industry of movie ...”

“... as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of contemporary bien pensantes, but to be fair to Gaskell (it’s perhaps too late to start calling her Stevenson ...”

“... likely to experience vivid indignation or contempt at the way in which human beings are shaped by class, periods and settings.) At the same time, Hobhouse must count as an English writer, too. Like her heroine, whom Janet Hobhouse closely resembles, she had an English father, and in part, if reluctantly, she adopted England as a country (not the country) of ...”

“... of his life in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City – a drab working-class satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing ...”

“... or England is on hold for the foreseeable future. While Britain shifts hesitantly onto a ‘war-footing’, the cultural and economic divides that split the nation in two in the summer of 2016 have been suspended, save for the self-separation of a privileged few who are able to escape to a remote island or hunker down in the country pile for a few ...”

“... I said.That’s not true, she said.Maybe they didn’t matter.Objecting to a new memoir-writing class, Lilia suggests flower arranging would be more practical; that way, ‘you can plan your own funeral display.’ Her bad temper doesn’t bother the other residents – it’s as if they’ve been gentled into submission while they await the inevitable ...”

“... But French support continued to dwindle. By 1408 the campaign had degenerated into a guerrilla war, and by early 1409 the self-proclaimed Prince of Wales was a desperate and hunted man. The revolt destroyed what little trust existed between the English and the Welsh inhabitants of Wales, shattering any pretence of parity between them. Despite the fact that ...”

“... elements eventually wore him down, forcing his resignation. After a spell in the RAF during the war, he went to the LSE before spending a couple of years as an anti-colonial activist in Africa. He was elected to Parliament in 1957 at the age of 32, becoming Britain’s youngest MP. He steadily climbed the political ladder and was an increasingly prominent ...”

“... humanity,’ Milman concludes, ‘the loss of insects would be an agonising ordeal eclipsing any war and even rivalling the looming ravages of climate breakdown.’A major cause of the decline, Goulson and Milman agree, is the change from agriculture to agribusiness in recent decades. Along with the industrial use of pesticides, one of the biggest factors ...”

“... with so little affection that when it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War she was ‘rather pleased’. Linda Lear suggests, plausibly, that the grimness of Potter’s childhood was exaggerated by her earlier biographers. Certainly it was materially comfortable but it was strikingly austere. The older Potters were affectionate in ...”

“... are not identical groups, and that literacy in someone else’s culture, as for many upper-class Indians under British rule, if not accompanied by equality of opportunity, may foster a hostile nationalism. Anderson is sometimes led away by trivia, or by the desire to present a paradox. ‘There has not been an English dynasty ruling in London since the ...”

“... 162 countries (those ranked lower were all experiencing, or had recently experienced, a state of war). Life expectancy at birth was 40 years, and it’s falling. The greatest worry is that many Malawian households are caught in a desperate poverty trap. Employment is both hard to come by and very poorly paid (the minimum legal wage is around £11 a ...”