Search Results

“... particularly as an agent of upward mobility. Back on the ‘mainland’, Viktor Samsonov, of lower-class provincial origin, had been on the upward path, sent after seven years of primary education to study surveying at Petrozavodsk Industrial Technical School, when in 1937 he was arrested as an 18-year-old student along with other Komsomol activists. He ...”

“... by the Dutch. Yet that didn’t stop the Portuguese and Spanish undermining their commercial class with a wave of inquisitorial prosecutions in the 1630s and 1640s. The persecution of New Christians reduced ‘Portuguese capacity for investment and trade in Asia’ and ‘disrupted significant networks of trade’ in Spanish America, causing ‘the ...”

“... tearing up your flesh;and the rebels them start a fightingthe youth them just turn wild.it’s war amongst the rebels;madness, madness, war.In ‘All Wi Doin is Defendin’, Johnson addresses the police, warning that ‘all oppression/can do is bring/passion to di heights of eruption.’ Poems such as these came to seem ...”

“... standing trial. How somebody as worldly and bright as Wilde, so alert to the laws of the ruling class and at the receiving end of so much advice and so vulnerable to blackmail and so broke, could have been led so easily towards his downfall remains a mystery. But there are crucial aspects of his make-up and background, especially in the quality of his ...”

“... pique at not being given a bigger role at party conference and broke with Starmer over Israel’s war in Gaza. But the more obvious relationship is of kinship: Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of ...”

“... the effect of that money has become almost entirely toxic. I’m not talking here about middle-class envy – the resentment increasingly expressed among the ‘middle-class poor’ about how unfair it is that these bankers get paid so much for contributing so little. That resentment seems to me to be largely ...”

“... he and Micheline were reunited.Inever saw​ Granny Helen smoke, though I do know that during the war she carried a full cigarette case, as a strategy. I remember only in outline the story my father told me of these cigarettes, the currency of fugitives, appeasing an excitable border guard on a train. I remember him saying that the train was very, very long ...”

“... to cater to what she saw as the trivialisation of artistic and intellectual life after World War One. Firmly anchored in the moral and stylistic conventions of 19th-century realism, she was largely impervious to the avant-garde experiments of writers like Joyce or Woolf. Nor, for all her bleakness, was she interested in conveying that spirit of ...”

“... poetry. It was the first of many such sustaining literary friendships. The Borges family spent the war years in Switzerland; once the war was over they moved to Spain: first to Barcelona, then to Majorca, then to Seville and Madrid. Jorge Luis was writing poetry and allying himself with any young Spanish avant-garde writers ...”

“... kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His attendance was dropping and he had four detentions. He got an A in Maths and Drama, but did less well in English and got a D in French (‘Ronald made very little progress this ...”

“... in the Amazon book, O’Hanlon announces the childhood that any moderately intelligent middle-class English reader of Into the Heart of Borneo would have imagined for him. In the forests of Borneo Fenton had suggested that O’Hanlon was out to prove his manhood, but Fenton was wrong: O’Hanlon isn’t proving his manhood, he’s rediscovering that ...”

“... pathetic enough. Californians who grew up in the 1950s remember vividly the photographs of working-class women dragged kicking from their homes to clear the site of Chavez Ravine, the new stadium of the Los Angeles Dodgers, which needed plenty of space to carve out a new freeway offramp in a secluded neighbourhood. It is hard now to bring those images back to ...”

“... had one of them not found its way into Hermann Goering’s private collection. At the end of the war van Meegeren (who was traced as having dealt him the picture) was charged with collaboration, and to save himself confessed to the lesser crime of forgery. The trial took place in a courtroom lined with what had till then been considered some of Holland’s ...”

“... Ford Madox Ford novel, one would be a place, the other Head of a beastly Public School for Middle-Class Girls. Kipling was adept at parody. By writing with Tennysonian or Arnoldian grandeur about the realities of Anglo-Indian life, he dramatised not only his literary ambitions but differences of attitude between the British at home and the British in ...”

“... her unshakeable conviction of social superiority to everyone in Hanmer. In fact, her sense of what class amounted to was remarkably pure and precise, in its South Wales way. Owning a business in a community where virtually everyone else went down the pit for wages would have seemed, in her youth, thoroughly posh. And the simple fact of not working when all ...”