“... of the great themes of this century’s verse, then Williams, though a kind of retreating upper-class Imperial Englishness is implicit in many poems, belongs to the post-Lowell part of the century, in which ‘home’ means not so much territory as people. In Dock Leaves, his finest collection to date, Williams, celebrated memorialist of his father, writes ...”

“... Britain is very different from that of Attlee’s Britain. The old male wage-earning working class has half-disappeared, as a re suit not only of the decay of manufacturing industry but also of the huge decline – which has gone even further elsewhere – of the male proportion of the workforce. At the same time there has been a steady rise in ...”

“... in the Studies in Hysteria might well have been in institutions if they had not been middle-class Viennese.) Writers such as Maupassant and Poe were exploring the byways of the mind, and towards the end of the century titles like Multiplex Personality, Das Doppel-Ich and Les Maladies de la personnalité abounded. Connections between the unconscious or ...”

“... to make her living by her pen. For Greer, Behn is an ambiguous female, who must have been lower class if she grovelled so flatteringly to the low-born Nell Gwynn. It has been suggested elsewhere that Aphra Behn had some connections with Kentish gentry, but Greer will have none of it: ‘It is more likely that Mrs Behn’s was a milieu without social ...”

“... remain unknown, as playwrights, north of the Pyrenees; and no Spanish dramatist since the Civil War has produced anything even remotely comparable to El público (‘The Audience’ or ‘The Public’), Once Five Years Pass, Don Perlimplín, Doña Rosita the Spinster, Blood Wedding, Yerma or The House of Bernarda Alba. Lorca was also a great poet, perhaps ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... least in its early seasons, Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ended, when HBO ...”