“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in public, took up teaching, fell in love with a pupil, and when the affair was terminated by her class-conscious father, took up religion and philosophy and became a churchgoer. He was jolted out of his self-absorption, according to his mother, by the July Days of 1830: ‘C’est le canon qui l’a guéri,’ she would say. He sketched, but never ...”

“... literature, and had no more than a toehold in what was still a male domain. They were second-class citizens – just like their granddaughters and great granddaughters in the Cambridge of 1928. Not only did those women novelists have to do without men’s advantages, Woolf continued: they had at the same time to write like men, and even – following the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not something you can enter and exit every two minutes to check dog videos and the progress of the war in Ukraine. When I click away from a book, I find people on the internet reading books, or at least taking photographs of the covers. You wonder where they get the time.In the spring of 1988, I had an Amstrad 8512 with a slow-blinking green cursor that slowed ...”

“... course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties hero is himself a working-class would-be novelist, ‘forever craving an ink-fix’ and given to bemoaning the blizzard of rival authors sweeping through the city: ‘To get into the boozers you’d to plod through drifts of Hemingways and Mailers. Kerouacs by the dozen could be found ...”

“... friends and critics it seemed to sum up every tawdry thing they suspected and despised about post-war America: vulgarity, self-promotion and hustle; the giant-finned American cars in Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’, that slide by on grease with ‘a savage servility’; the slippery, oily and false. Americanism, slickness and writing come together ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... having been ‘destined for the leadership of the Party’ misunderstands the very nature of post-war Conservatism. To emphasise loyalty as one of Mrs Thatcher’s most conspicuous characteristics overlooks a record extending far beyond the said Einstein. ‘If you’ve been in the Thatcher Court, you’ll always be close to her’ is an anonymous quote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”