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“... in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain people’. In his Medieval Village (1925), the Cambridge historian G.G. Coulton ...”

“... of spirit hand in hand with absence of analysis, that’s what’s always buggered up the working class.’ Walser goes mad but returns to sanity and Fevvers’ arms, and the book ends in glee: ‘The spiralling tornado of Fevvers’ laughter began to twist and shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly ...”

“... account of the relation of the intellectual to the state, called The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (published in English in 1979). They wrote the book in retreat in a peasant cottage to escape police surveillance. Szelenyi’s introduction, written from Adelaide in 1978, evokes the combination of fear and recklessness with which ‘we consciously ...”

“... him as she used to do for her brother. The strength of this attachment is like that of Sonya in War and Peace (herself modelled on Tolstoy’s aunt), whom the married Natasha inexcusably calls ‘a sterile flower’ – Mary Wordsworth would never have said such a thing. Dorothy’s reward – if it can be called that – was to be tenderly cared for in the ...”

“... horror at the gulf between himself and the London poor and his resolve to work with his hands in a class-free society lasted little longer than the time it took him to clear a five-acre plot and find that he could not obtain title. He quickly rediscovered education as the family trade and as the only sure source of livelihood. All five of Dr Arnold’s sons ...”

“... who aspired to a career in learning, or as coaches for the next generation of wranglers (first-class mathematics graduates), would waste precious time on the arduous pursuit of an otherwise little-valued expertise. New ways of thought were, indeed, sorely needed, as we can see in retrospect. Newton’s example of a hundred years earlier had been largely ...”

“... was demolished in 1974; the geriatric wards, psychiatric department and boiler-house are in post-war blocks; mortuary, operating theatre and pathology department were added in the Twenties and Thirties. Despite change, most patients are still housed in wards built in the 19th century. In the history of the hospital and workhouse, social concerns, clinical ...”

“... upon ‘Cambridge English’ and its vicissitudes. Then there are larger meditations on region and class in the English novel. The essay I like best is a dogged effort to make sense of Hard Times and of the ‘two incompatible ideological positions’ it articulates: ‘first, that environment influences and in some sense determines character; second, that ...”

“... my life is of no interest because I am a man of the people.’ He had lived in every class of society and belonged to none. Lastly, by confessing so much that was disgraceful about himself, he meant to convince his readers of his candour and of the consolation that perfect sincerity may offer. It all seems so simple, so straightforward, even ...”

“... by difference, a person for whom the problem of difference – of identity itself, and the war between purity and danger – has disappeared. Vested Interests implies, with a light but well-researched touch, that our most intense erotic attachments are to our categories. That we hold ourselves together by keeping things apart. Garber wants us to wonder ...”

“... safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. Some camera. And yet of course the metaphor is not meaningless, or damaged by all this mental activity. It is an introduction to the Isherwood of the stories, a person whose self is in his observations, not his (fortunately rare) dips into ...”

“... mimic the supposed rationalities of the market. In this it does not differ at bottom from the class reductionism which he rightly assaults in some marxisant academics. A harsher critic than I might well regard Posner’s economic fixation as the 13th chime of the clock, especially since Posner himself insists on the integration, in his thinking, of ...”

“... illuminated by a series of fascinating case histories, on three levels: literary analysis, high-class gossip and talk-show vignettes. The literary analysis ranges from the study of Tiresias to discussions of contemporary novelists (John Cheever, Stephen Spender and many more) and films. This category often blends into the second, since much of the gossip is ...”

“... the witchhunter in his looking-glass; taking individual women out of their context, ignoring their class, place, work, family, to corral them in a realm of universal ascriptions constitutes the founding act of misogyny. All the books considered here wrestle with this problem, they reach for the particular moment, the detailed cluster of circumstances, the ...”

“... self-assertion – one of the intermittent sub-plots in her essays is a critique of the post-war, upper-middle-class English character – we get a vivid picture of an absolutely unendearing psychoanalytic orthodoxy. The establishment and its ‘rebels’ always do each other’s bidding, but Coltart has managed to ...”