“... brutal coercion – was closed. Maxwell’s alternative strategy was to woo the Scottish working class with the promise of an independent socialist state.Before its overhaul by Maxwell and the 79-ers, as Jackson shows, the SNP was the preserve of an atypical but conventional enough minority of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie. There was a smattering of poets and ...”

“... But these reservations, Bull points out, ‘would not necessarily have extended to cataclysmic war, mass extermination, the renewal of slavery and the breeding of a master race’. How to undo this malevolent influence? Bull’s approach is typically devious. Rather than breaking the news that breeding a master race is a bad idea, he takes issue with ...”

“... then), that her paintings are domestic or amateurish, that the Bloomsbury Group fiddled during the war, that the Omega creations were shoddy, that her best work is derivative and her late work poor. Much of this seems to matter less than it did – who cares if the handles fell off their jugs? – or doesn’t seem particularly helpful: when is an artist ...”

“... Case’. Poor Cow, the title of Nell Dunn’s novel and Ken Loach’s film of 1967 about a working-class London girl who gets everything wrong, might have applied to her.On 23 April 1726, Mary Toft was at work in the fields near Godalming in Surrey with two female friends when a rabbit leaped up beside them. All three women were pregnant and probably ...”

“... when referring to the New York Times. ‘Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.’ Like every white person of her generation she has skeletons in her closet: until the age of 22, she did not realise that the California Raisins were racist.Every day the masses enter the portal and study, with ‘a single eye’, the ...”

“... made the subject of a gripping analogy with the adoption of the Schlieffen Plan in the Great War. The current side, though, looks exceptionally flexible, not just by German but by any standards: they have, in Lothar Matthäus and Andreas Brehme, two world-class players who play their club football in Milan, where the ...”

“... than Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin. This is a mistake, not only because there are so many post-war songwriters to choose from but because popular song is now the art-form through which most people confirm or recreate the experience of being in love. Love is nothing if not the common touch, and without Lennon-McCartney and the rest the Chatto Book of Love ...”

“... equal merit. ‘I’m too respectable now’, he wrote in February 1889, ‘to mix among the lower-class natives as I used to do.’ By December 1897 there was no water in the spring which Hay had seen bubbling just over two years earlier. ‘Nothing has come to me,’ Kipling told Norton. ‘I am not bothering,’ he added. ‘Maybe South Africa will unlock ...”

“... was born in India. If the tales Leonowens told about herself were an attempt to acquire middle-class respectability, as Morgan plausibly argues, the tales she told about the women of Siam accorded them something like glory. Unlike The English Governess, which offers a more or less coherent narrative with Anna and the King as principal figures, The Romance ...”

“... was slow. The first major breakthrough was the introduction, by the Americans, during the War of Independence, of the Kentucky rifle: its bullet was wrapped in greased leather so that it would slip down the grooves of the barrel. By the 1830s, mass-produced revolvers, Colts for example, were widely available, but these were still muzzle-loaded and ...”

“... the fake artists, the sociopaths and string-pullers higher up, and the mass-murderers in war and peace’ whose inspiration and guidance have reputedly come from books of the sort listed in Kearney’s bibliography. ‘Beautiful or repellent, normal or perverse,’ says Legman, ‘erotic books are not and have never been the school of crime.’ He ...”

“... They are brought about, almost always, by the great all-rounders – cricketers who are top-class batsmen and bowlers at the same time, who refuse to say which role they prefer, and who can on any day be as good at one as at the other. Such players invariably upset specialists, commentators and authorities. The reason for this is that they ...”

“... that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British passports in common. At least James’s literary nationality has never been in doubt, though this is scarcely true of his friend and compatriot Samuel Beckett. It would be ...”

“... about ordinary daily experience and reads the messages they encode about religious particularism, class expectations and gender propriety. The implications of what she finds can be broadly applied, but the focus of her evidence is more narrow than the subtitle suggests: she draws principally on Nuremberg, Leipzig, Augsburg and other significant towns, like ...”

“... feel misunderstood, underappreciated, condescended to and confined to jobs they don’t like. The class consciousness that Werther experiences is hardly a thing of the past, even in post-Thatcher Britain, with its avowed commitment to merit alone, or at least to money alone. The trials and tribulations of sensitive young people are seen in numerous books and ...”