“... patients in asylums. It was soon incorporated into the decennial US census. During the First World War it was used for assessing army recruits, perhaps the first time it was put to diagnostic use. Although the manual is American, it is much used elsewhere, despite the fact that the International Classification of Diseases, drawn up under the auspices of the ...”

“... in the 1930s. Tessimond was born in Birkenhead in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an earlier oddball of British poetry, he was sent to Charterhouse School; he can’t have enjoyed it much, for when he was 16 he ran away to London, naively hoping to establish himself as ...”

“... and in some countries (such as Belgium and France) job protection. After the Second World War, Attlee’s Labour government embarked on a campaign to decasualise work through a social insurance system that would include all employees. But the most generous benefits were always limited in scope: unlike government-funded social assistance – which can ...”

“... is shown posing for the camera as a ‘dying warrior’). But he came from the middle class and was much too large and ungainly to cut the necessary figure in Montesquiou’s crowd. He was always getting into fistfights, in part because of his taste for rough trade, but also because he was driven by resentment: with him, you wonder which came ...”

“... a travesty of the national anthem performed on a Stratocaster, speaks to violence at home and war abroad. Johnson’s bombing campaign in North Vietnam, which had wound up in November the previous year, was still fresh in people’s minds, and it transpired later that Hendrix had closed out the festival six months – to the day – after Nixon began ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”