“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... laboured were called. Prices for everything skyrocketed: eggs were a dollar apiece in 1849, and a war broke out later over control of the stony Farallones islands rookery thirty miles west of San Francisco, where seabirds’ eggs were gathered to augment what the chickens could produce. A good pair of boots was a hundred dollars. Land downtown was so valuable ...”

“... devastating book could have been surprised: Egyptians, he suggests, were defeated before the war even started. In Robyn Creswell’s new translation, That Smell seems not so much written as secreted; it leaves you feeling tense and clammy, as it must have done when it was first published. Ibrahim was 29 then, and only two years out of prison, where ...”

“... appear in their ordinary business and their ordinary pleasures’. He was thinking only of middle-class men – ‘the crowds of the exchange and the coffee house … the convivial table’ – and probably not of women at all, but even such men figure only ‘minimally in his History, driven out by high affairs of state’. Gender relations – ‘at least ...”