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“... rather better with Ms Lane and Ms Hayter. They, too, have their foibles. They confuse the pre-war six-day cycle races, run in the old Vélodrome d’Hiver, with the present-day, outdoor Tour de France. They call cadres (often middle-grade executives or white-collar workers) ‘senior officials’. They translate pétitions du principe ...”

“... kind of modern artist, and the increasing recognition of an exposed and unjustly suffering social class, who in all other respects are very distant from such art. Many years ago I described one form of this relationship, with reference to Gissing, as ‘negative identification’: the exposed and isolated artist makes the suffering of the poor a form and an ...”

“... is said to have been a slave-trader, and they ran guns for the Southern rebels during the Civil War. Each generation of Nedeeds has a Luther (the Christian name suggests Lucifer, rather than Martin Luther King) and he is always in charge of wedding and funeral arrangements, a solemn and forbidding master of ceremonies. The well-paced, ironic ...”

“... misfortune of not having to work twelve hours a day’ and wastes two years ‘waging ceaseless war on cigars and new boots’. Idle, vain, but bright, energetic, full of generous and decent impulses, Lucien eventually decides to make something of himself and joins the Army. As his father buys a commission for him and he can pick his own regiment, he ...”

“... generational groups in recent British history – the Oxford student cohort of the immediate post-war period who clambered aboard the great Labour surge of 1945-51. This cohort was the exact British analogue of the bright young New Dealers from the American Ivy League campuses so tellingly depicted by Mary McCarthy in The Group. For these young people, the ...”

“... on a scale of correctness. Its position now is simply that of one dialect among many – a class dialect in some areas and a literary dialect in a more general sense. But even as a literary dialect it is increasingly coloured by regional differences of idiom and vocabulary. In the past, strong advocates of a ‘national literature’ for countries like ...”

“... the work of Oliver Cromwell’s widow – was published only to be lampooned, and another Civil War widow, Lucy Hutchinson, was constrained to complain of the ‘court caterpillars’ who could present her husband as a life-denier in spite of his affection for music and dancing and his ‘rule of temperance in meat, drink, apparel and all those things that ...”

“... because they are presupposed to there being anything to explain.’ And to these he adds a second class of predicate, itself the product of scientific explanation, which enables us to identify those properties which constitute something as a such-and-such in the light of a particular scientific theory. Science, in other words, if Wiggins is right, cannot do ...”

“... is always social as well as personal, it is always for its bearer (an individual or even a class) both a resource in understanding and an impediment to understanding, laying some prospects effortlessly open to our cognitive grasp and shutting off others with at least equal firmness. Between what we can scarcely help experiencing and what we simply ...”

“... surprising to find him saying: ‘In Britain the Westminster Gazette, which perished before World War II’ – actually in 1928 – ‘was the last paper that relied for its circulation on the political guidance it provided for its 25,000 readers.’ What about the Guardian, or the Morning Star, or the Daily Telegraph? And when one finds him writing about ...”

“... He was intended for the Methodist ministry and perhaps for this reason never learned to dance. War shortened the medical course and in 1917, after his fifth year, he left for England as a member of the Canadian Army Medical Corps. ‘He saw a fair bit of action and received the Military Cross for his courage under fire at Cambrai, where he was wounded in ...”

“... of mind which tended to excessive preoccupation with what went on inside the mind itself? When the war came Williams was declared to be medically C3 because of bad eyesight, and he was told that he would be called up only for home duties. So he reasonably enough availed himself of ‘the permission given to ordinands by the Government to continue their ...”

“... or Chicago force), but can be very high-handed and contemptuous of civilians – even white middle-class, rich or famous civilians. The Mayor of Los Angeles is black, and is also a former LAPD officer. Tom Bradley exudes flexibility, tolerance and a benign moral laxity. When his daughter was caught driving under the influence of PCP, she was ...”

“... women’s historians have detected a widening gulf between the private sphere of middle and upper-class women, and the public role of their menfolk, women from precisely these social backgrounds were being urged to read about the public past of the nations in which they lived. Moreover – and as in Austen’s case – a minority of women were beginning to ...”

“... without descending into conflict. It was even possible – or so it was thought – to wage war in a civil manner. Civility, Keith Thomas argues, ‘could mean everyday politeness’, but it could also refer to ‘the most desirable condition of organised human society, what would come to be called “civilisation”, the opposite of barbarism’. This ...”