“... the majority. He argues that climate change is the ‘cumulative effect of action at the level of class’ and that this fact, rather than a generalised and undifferentiated sense of human responsibility, ought to be the criterion for action. To sceptical ears this might sound like a doomed attempt to square the circle, or nostalgia for political ...”

“... which is also an ancient aesthetic adjective …Frederica stared almost wildly at the class, which stared back at her, and then smiled, a common smile of pleasure and understanding. For the rest of her life, she came back and back to this moment, the change in the air, the pricking of the hairs, of really reading every word of something she had ...”

“... way: the plans were shelved by Clarke’s successor, Michael Howard, in order to ‘avoid all-out war with the police’.After Labour came to power in 1997, the Blair government offered the police a new settlement. Funding increased by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and there were a range of new powers such as ASBOs, in return for more stringent performance ...”

“... much better than all that.’ Discotheques originated in occupied Paris during the Second World War. The Nazis banned jazz and closed many of the dance clubs, breaking up jazz groups and driving fans into illicit cellars to listen to recorded music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the ...”

“... me not only bad but remarkably vulgar as well, with the sort of involuntary vulgarity which upper-class assumptions of universal ownership entail. ‘Solid with yearning’ is an almost perfect description of something in Lowell himself, but simply makes a graffiti scribble across the simple mystery of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Vermeer is the reverse of ...”

“... Ninety-nine per cent of my friends have died like that.’ ‘The individuals of our ruling class’ have made ‘society sacrifice itself for them’. ‘We feel pain every minute of the day’ – at the lack of democracy – ‘and it’s worse than the pain of hunger. Democracy here is on the same level [of necessity] as the food we eat.’ And, on ...”

“... time-proofing them. McCormick’s more Marxist view rightly underlines the importance of social class and property for Machiavelli, who observes in the Discourses that in Rome the grandi happily ceded honours to the plebeians, ‘but when it came to property, always defended it with the utmost obstinacy’. In Savonarola’s Florentine republic of 1494-98 ...”

“... Yet in each case, he belongs to a non-marginal institution. In Austen, the navy, at a time of war. In Tolstoy, the army, bulwark of the tsar. In Eça and Alas, the church, at a time when its position in Portuguese and Spanish society was a subject of political contention.A final commonality: all four authors expect readers to know what is being referred ...”

“... new problem. What did Christianity mean in this alien world? The Jesuit answers came from first-class minds with an equally first-class humanist education and training in classical rhetoric. Just as the first followers of Jesus had taken a Gospel message to Greco-Roman society constructed on very different philosophical ...”

“... Review crowd (Marxism, Freudianism, alienation, modernism, the Bomb, the Lonely Crowd, the Cold War, the existential abyss), she would have secured a position as a valuable member of the firm, Hannah Arendt’s natural successor. But being young, avid and a member of the Pepsi generation, Sontag wanted to experience art corporeally, immersively, in the ...”

“... as a transparent cover for a bit of fun, and the euphemism is kept up respectfully in court. Class solidarity sometimes led magistrates to express their regret at inflicting ruin on MPs or men with distinguished military records. ‘This case is a tragedy,’ declared Mr Pratt, fining Major Fitzroy Fyers for persistently importuning in the tube station ...”

“... For two decades – more or less since the Falklands War, and the end of the military dictatorships that had become an international byword for counter-revolutionary ferocity – South America has been largely forgotten by world politics. Recycled democratisation, debt and dependency offered few conflicts and yielded no consequences to compare with dramas in Eastern Europe or Russia, the Middle or Far East, even domestic convulsions in North America ...”

“... stocks of fly powder on the old regime, and seeing who was left standing. ‘A privileged class,’ Sieyès wrote, ‘is like a pestilence upon the nation.’ In a related image, also somewhat Lenin-like in its apparent ruthlessness, he responded to the anxieties of those who wondered what would happen to the first two estates if the third estate ...”

“... of history it is action that counts: ‘Honour is flashed off exploit,’ he wrote: But be the war within, the brand we wield Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled, Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray. It seems to me that Bishop’s fiercest frays, the moral overcomings recorded both in her advance in her medium and in her penetration to ...”

“... like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the US between them. But these historical variants are not genuine time-travel narratives on the order of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), which inaugurates the standard narrative of the history of science fiction, to the detriment of Jules ...”