“... worked in the Nairobi brewery. Now, however, ‘the towns of East Africa contain many fat upper-class Africans; their leaders seen on television are often grossly obese.’ (Trowell suggests that obesity and the associated diabetes probably emerged as common disorders in the English upper classes in the late 18th century, when sugar was first reported in ...”

“... really believe,’ he asks, ‘that Lloyd George, who invented the welfare state and won a Great War and created modern Ireland, put the making of a single bishop at the top of his list of achievements?’ It is the voice of sober realism. Canon Charles Pattinson, who had been Henson’s chaplain, finally persuaded Chadwick to take on the at first rather ...”

“... with Washington hostesses and maîtres d’. But outside in the streets is the American working class, that seething mob of muggers and minorities, locked in combat with cops, hard-hats, blue-collars, rednecks and even hillbillies, sinister as Salem witches. Of course, it’s only a motion-picture scenario: but Monimbo and The Last Supper do try to make it ...”

“... and stops working. Most of the elements of Boyd’s other books turn up in Armadillo – scenes of war and surveillance, beaches, absent fathers, corpses, engaging hermetic lexicons – but it has more in common with The New Confessions, partly because in both the heroes take on not just an employer but, through him, a powerful ...”

“... worked until he was burned for denouncing the rampant splendours of the 15th-century ruling class. My book records that Fra Angelico painted a splendid Last Judgment there, replete with swarthy devils and boiling cauldrons. In the cloisters the atmosphere is gentle, the sunny yellow ochre of walls, the terracotta of pantiles, the speckled breast of a ...”

“... paid well, which was a valuable bonus when one’s income fell to a shilling a day in time of war; and its prestige was such that merely to have written for it that week was enough to win over an otherwise hesitant officer-selection board. Today a boasted connection with the Al Fayed Punch would be no way to win military advancement. The reputation of ...”

“... I was a gauche and provincial mathematics student of seventeen or so. Walking from one class to another, a fellow remarked: ‘You know what Wittgenstein wrote: “what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.” ’ I recall this event from over thirty years ago with peculiar vividness. There are lots of ...”

“... than convention. An instructor at Santa Barbara used to demonstrate the point. He would come into class in his wet-suit, still goggled and dripping from the ocean. The attitude has been extended to all inquiry. Our conceptions are all we have. There is no point of view that is not someone’s point of view. All views are conventional, there is no firm ...”

“... age of 17, along with her mother Phebe and thousands of others. Like so many women of her age and class who found employment in New York’s burgeoning stores, eating houses and cheap lodgings, she earned money by ministering to the needs of working men. In the four years she lived in New York, she also had a number of shadowy boyfriends. She had come to the ...”

“... lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself stands up to the Mob while working as a showgirl (‘You got class, kid’). Forthright on both race and gender issues, she insists on prosecuting and sending down a prominent lawyer for attempted rape (‘when a woman says no, she has a right to say no’). During her early film career, she and her friends tell off a ...”

“... a friend of Robert’s. The episode was glossed over in the name of Being, Nothingness and class struggle. Mascolo later brought out a lengthy essay on Communism in which he argued, ponderously, that an intellectual could not escape being a Communist, though at the same time it was impossible to be one. It was a heart-rending and sorry situation, as ...”

“... architecture, mathematics, the seasons, fortune-telling and mining. After Zeus’ victory in the war against his father, Cronus, the newly enthroned god decides to annihilate the entire human race and create a new species in its stead. ‘No one did anything against this plan,’ Prometheus laments (in Ewans’s ...”

“... bad thing. Having invoked Hill’s Levellers and Muggletonians and Thompson’s incipient working class as persuasive analogues, Howe doesn’t go on to celebrate the Afrocentrists as offering a rich and challenging alternative to the all too obvious failings of the academic mainstream. Instead, he sees their efforts as culminating in the ethnic nationalism ...”

“... concerning industrial strengths and weaknesses, its influence on nationalism and imperialism, on class warfare and xenophobia, on religious divisions and – as one rather feared – its role as a ‘defining occasion’ in the supposed search for a national identity. This can become heavy sledding. In his acknowledgments Auerbach pays tribute to a colleague ...”

“... both senses of the word) George’s mother. Swift perfectly captures the reticent, lower-middle-class English tone of that generation when he has George recall: ‘Now and then they’d both mention, with a certain look in their eye, “Mrs Barrett’s place” – “Mrs Barrett’s place in Broadstairs”, as if Mrs Barrett was some guard dog they’d ...”