“... It’s nice​ to settle in with an old-fashioned story of inheritances, dramatic shifts in social class and the occasional total eclipse of the Sun. Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars begins in the late 19th century, following the story of the women (and a few men, too) who worked at the Harvard College Observatory computing the location and brightness of the stars ...”

“... which swelled in successive editions to include more than four thousand sayings and proverbs (‘war is sweet to those who have not tried it’), many of which were accompanied by extensive glosses. The Adagia went through around 150 editions in the 16th century, and was quoted, cut, expanded, reprinted, requoted and translated more times than anyone can ...”

“... which even the simplest wording conceals. In this way, if one looked no further than the school class room and the university seminar, it would seem that history in the Seventies, as in the previous decade, was progressively decentred to the point where its autonomous existence, as a teaching subject or a ‘discipline’, was in doubt. It was extra-murally ...”

“... Burke lived at the same time and in the same country: but at opposite ends of the spectrum of class, ends which rarely met, except in court. Such people were strangers to one another, foreigners, and could hate and suspect one another in the style that has been reserved for foreigners. Smith and Burke lived for a while in the same place, Edinburgh – the ...”

“... out to command the means of ending everything. By l9l9, the arms race has produced its world war, and the ‘aerial battleship’ designed at the Undershaft factory has evolved into the bomber that bombs Heartbreak House. It is not Wagner, one of the mythologists of the end of everything, but a composer with a bigger popular vote than Shaw’s propaganda ...”

“... which ghosts and séance scenes held in the imaginations of their readers. During the First World War, as Maddox says, ‘grieving millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from their lost men.’ Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: ‘I seemed suddenly to see that it was really something tremendous, a breakdown of walls between two worlds, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... manufacturer and a Russian search engine, at ease with the jargon of the world-bestriding MBA class, shrugging off the opening and closing of factories in this or that country as no more than the fluttering of gills on Mammon’s throat. Rees-Mogg failed in his first tilt at Parliament, running for a working-...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”