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“... a loyal following for his early ‘science fiction’ fantasies such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and his novels of lower-middle-class life such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, but his always overdrawn account as a sage or oracle was effectively closed. Critical opinion moved more and more in the ...”

“... Laura Miller, a social scientist, sees what has happened since the 1960s as a long ‘book war’, with implications that extend far beyond the book trade. Books are a particularly illustrative commodity – involving, as they do, issues of commercial profit, cultural responsibility and the consumer’s lust for bargains. They cut through to the ...”

“... they ‘overwhelmingly emphasise conscious deliberation’. That was the point Tolstoy made in War and Peace – that you can’t have a theory of accidents, that if contingency rules nothing rules that a method could account for – but as Tilly sees it, this isn’t something the social sciences want to recognise. If you don’t, as part of your ...”

“... conservatism derives in great part from its insular tradition, the absence of defeat in external war and major social disturbance at home, and the consequent extraordinary continuities of its elites and institutions. Italy, on the other hand, has been shaped by its geopolitical position at the centre of the Mediterranean, looking in one direction towards the ...”

“... historians have recently shown that William Wallace and Robert Bruce, icons of Scotland’s War of Independence against England in the late 13th and early 14th century, became unionist heroes in 19th-century Scottish culture. Without Wallace and Bruce, so Victorian Scots argued, Scotland would have been conquered by Edward I and incorporated as a vassal ...”

“... its pacemakers, drug regimes and artificial limbs, is usually also the First World middle to upper-class economic subject with a conscious incentive to preserve life for as long as possible under the best possible conditions. Of course, death must come, and tragedy could work as a reminder of that. But it is at least arguable that the norm of a species-being ...”

“... year, ending up in Chelsea. He had one more, limited, opportunity to build when, during the Great War, an engineer and manufacturer of model trains, Wenman Bassett-Lowke, asked him to remodel the interior of his Georgian terraced house in Northampton. After that, Mackintosh and Margaret moved to the South of France where he devoted himself to ...”

“... before he wrote The Corrections and Freedom – two internationally bestselling epics of middle-class white America struggling with marriage, parenthood, illness and climate change – and his two earlier, somewhat disavowed systems novels. Thirty years ago he was just a Swarthmore student abroad in what was still West Berlin, exploring his vices and ...”

“... with a wave in the direction of some good bits. On what ageing does to the skin of the middle-class male body: As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begins to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes. For a year or two your hands are as nicked and scraped as a schoolboy’s knee. Then you learn to protect ...”

“... as a kind of cross-categorical switch which is analogous to the kinds of analogy that generate the class ‘cat’. In Institutio Oratoria, the fullest rhetorical handbook from the ancient world, Quintilian regarded metaphor as first among what were termed the ‘tropes’, or the figures of speech that change a word or phrase ‘from its proper meaning to ...”

“... the result is I’m in pig.’ Being pregnant was treated like another appointment, neither World War Two nor luncheon at the Savoy, but somewhere in between. The Mitfords weren’t feminists, and they weren’t Virginia Woolf, but it seems possible that Woolf would have had a nicer time altogether had she known how to have a friend like Nancy or Jessica ...”

“... in Brooklyn started to fail; the dough-boys and dock workers who had been his customers during the war stopped coming. Eisenstadt tore out the tables and counter, bought a tea-bagging machine, and put up a sign that read ‘The Cumberland Packing Company’. The company trod water for a while, slowly losing money, until one day Eisenstadt and his ...”

“... and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad with the resolve of a baseball umpire ...”

“... his vocal mannerisms. In particular he had developed what Americans thought of as a British upper-class stammer . . . It became almost impossible to distinguish between the two voices and even close friends could never quite work out at once who it was who had picked up the phone . . . There was something at once touching, funny and eerie about this partial ...”

“... his real-estate holdings and enter the coal and banking businesses, adroitly riding the post-Civil War boom in western Pennsylvania until he had more than enough capital to set up his five surviving sons in business. He was as zealous a superintendent of his large family as he was of his fortune. He schooled his older boys at home, chose the businesses they ...”