“... quickly came to sound modish, old-fashioned or just old-aged, the period after the Second World War saw a retreat to more timeless and ageless seeming names, especially for boys. On my first day at primary school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic ...”

“... you know it all,’ I have always found almost unbearably emotional, and standing in front of a class of undergraduates I again wondered why this was. Very early the next morning I woke with the answer: the line reproduces in a slightly different pattern the o sounds in windows/open/south in the second line. The two young women are shadows now, but in ...”

“... which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.’There​ was no sign of Icke when I arrived in Trafalgar Square. Piers Corbyn, whose brother, the former Labour leader, can’t be held responsible for him, was ...”

“... operation before she could conceive. She waited until Harry left on a business trip, sold a French war bond given to her by an uncle and went under the knife. Soon she was pregnant.When Schwartz learned that his birth was the result of a deception it strengthened the feeling he had struggled with all his life: that perhaps he should not have existed at all. In ...”

“... Sociology of Knowledge that had Marx and Hegel in it, and yes of course she could squeeze us in. A class for us on Hegel’s Phenomenology? She beamed like an Intelligent Angel, as she referred to Edna in Love’s Work: it would be a joy. ‘Gosh, yes, she’s very … enthusiastic,’ the philosophy man said when we told him, looking even more unhappy; there ...”

“... keep her in power. They were powerfully assisted in this by the fact that voters from the social class C2 were a. the key target in Tory plans to lure former Labour voters; b. heavily represented in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF ...”

“... where my father had built a house, I’d never been back as an adult. I had also never had a first-class air ticket, never written a full-length screenplay and never been met at the airport by someone handing over $500 in cash. Because I had been surviving abroad on the equivalent of $100 a week and had no American reserves, this piquant financial arrangement ...”

“... taking on crippling debt. The future members of Roxy Music, born into working or lower-middle-class families, would metamorphose into literate exquisites, seriously arty poseurs, in a way previously unthinkable. As happy beneficiaries of postwar social mobility, Eno later recalled, they each brought with them different experiences and different ...”

“... Margaret, a petty tyrant who doesn’t appear in a single scene.) Among the three teenagers, class conflict doesn’t just complicate sexual tension but replaces it. The legend stipulates a fatal chemistry – ‘It is only together they are destroying each other’ – but they’re oddly immune to it. They hardly seem suited to be the wires through ...”

“... then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely to find myself fighting in it. What was so astonishing at the meeting – and also embarrassing – was to find Mrs Kettle weeping over the plight of North Korea and having ...”

“... discover the emptiness and fraudulence at its core. Somewhere Morris is, or rather was, an upper-class English gent imbued with the values of his sex and class – the family on his mother’s side descends from ‘modest English squires’. When Morris sheds maleness, it is therefore a patriotic, militarist identity, with ...”

“... revealed the moment Hastings’s curtain went up on a tea-party in the garden of Viv’s middle-class family, with the backcloth portraying a mansion considerably larger than Blenheim Palace. This social slip, entailed by Hastings’s theory that Tom married Viv as a step in his social climbing, only epitomised all the more serious things that went wrong ...”

“... North blew up, they realised that they had a central role to play in guiding an Irish professional class away from ancient pieties. They tried it on me. I went to University College Dublin in 1972 to study History and English. If there was a forbidden ‘f’ word or a forbidden ‘c’ word while we studied there, they were ‘Fenian’ and ...”

“... teachers. Against all the odds posed by his clearly superior abilities, he contrived to get second-class honours in Classics, not so much for neglecting the books as for being contemptuous of Plato. He discovered Swinburne – at that time a writer banned from the University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he ...”

“... had (immediately) chosen Moscow; and there he was to remain until the end of the Second World War, true to the party he had joined in 1918 and apparently at one with the Stalinist consequences of the Leninism to which he had fully committed himself by the early 1920s. His friend and antagonist, exact contemporary and truest counterpart, was Ernst ...”