“... that figure is struggling to contain. He lost his father, his mother, his childhood really. The war took from him his friends, his idealism, a good proportion of his self-belief. And yet, he kept on going. His letters show a man of loyalty, generosity and lovely manners6 (though not much irony or sense of the ridiculous, and he does complain a lot about ...”

“... KNOWS SHORTHAND.’ At home, she had to retype his poems every time he changed a word. During the war he was in prison for several months for his own bizarre form of conscientious objection, and he possibly broke her nose at least one more time in a fight. Their last summer together, as she wrote in ‘An Influx of Poets’, a story published in the New ...”

“... only be disfigured if it were explained: partly, one suspects, because we are talking about a class of feelings particularly difficult for the Hemingway man. Anyone familiar with the peculiar pleasures of explorers’ narratives will know that the most pleasurable are those that do not pre-empt your primitive enjoyment by telling you what it should ...”

“... of the subject. Almost overnight a new philosophical literature emerged dealing with topics like war, abortion and affirmative action, and this was followed soon after, especially in the United States, by a proliferation of university classes on ‘contemporary moral problems’ and ‘applied ethics’. New work in meta-ethics was slower to appear, but the ...”

“... first his childhood in ‘a town on the Dutch coast where to pose as an Englishman was a mark of class’, and then his experiences in Japan. In the first place he has an English grandmother and is bilingual, so is at home nowhere, since correct pronunciation of English words at his cricket club in Holland ‘would have subjected me to ridicule’. The ...”

“... at the time. The book is cold about those foreigners who are British. During the Second World War he sat by the wireless with his father listening to the News. ‘I took it for granted that the British, unattractive as they were, spoke the truth, and that when the BBC announcer reported that Royal Air Force bombers had bombed some German city with great ...”

“... the age. They are the members of the bourgeoisie best placed to take the sordid measure of their class, the repositories of murky family secrets and the arbiters in callous disputes over money between kith and kin. They are also the fixers who smoothe the path of the speculators, that small, secretive band of predatory initiates who rule the financial roost ...”

“... Tony Harrison does this when he harnesses his Classical learning and tones to write about working-class life in Leeds (he also uses straight dialect); Douglas Dunn does it when he writes in Northlight with Marvellian decorum about Tayport; Les Murray when he writes about Bunyah. Use of proper names (where’s Tayport? where’s Bunyah? where’s ...”

“... who knows it all: Kicking and Screaming is particularly good on English soccer in the early post-war years, when star players were paid next to nothing and, on top of that, were treated with crass condescension by the suits and bowler hats at the FA. There are several sardonic contributions here from members of the 1947-8 England team that beat Holland ...”

“... Speech, with its promise of the most far-reaching constitutional change since the First World War, seemed to bear out such impressions. So did the unexpectedly broad, almost Wilsonian, spread of appointments. Part of that reflected the material Blair was bequeathed by Shadow Cabinet elections – and party rules requiring him to use it. Although the ...”

“... occurred. The general election passes by without remark, nor is anything said about the Falklands war of the preceding year – that is, until Will comes close to having sex with an Argentinian (‘I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film’). Will’s ignorance about Aids gives a flavour of the ...”

“... and unilateral disarmament debates, the formation of New Labour, the Falklands and the Gulf War, the winning back of power by Labour are all subsumed by her own family and career story, mere signs of the passing of time. The fact that she cannot write has been mentioned a good deal in reviews, but it is the way in which she does write that is more ...”

“... at all? This question was answered in 1890 by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure class, where he had something to say about men’s dress as about virtually all human artefacts: Much of the charm that invests the patent leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking stick, which so greatly enhances the ...”

“... the New York Post: ‘In your article you describe me as an émigré of the Russian aristocratic class. I am very proud of my ancestry which actually is Jewish.’ When she was asked if she was Russian she replied: ‘Yes, Russian and Jewish.’ She was appalled when her sister Lena, living in Sweden, renounced her Judaism, or as one family member happily ...”

“... 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 ...”