“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he’ll willingly go. He’s a detective of the Raymond Chandler type, with a touch of Bogart’s class – he once had a fling with Daphne Airmont, heiress to the Airmont cheese fortune. He’s wisecracking, fast-talking, like everyone in this place. Here he is with April Randazzo, nightclub crooner, a few dances in: ‘Oh my! Is that for me?’ April ...”

“... could not have been satisfied in Iceland even if he’d been made of money. He liked working-class women, preferably barmaids of fairly mature years, and he did not want them for normal sex, from which he had a chilly aversion. He wanted buggery only, and only with partners who also wanted it exclusively. Preliminary enquiries, you’d have thought, must ...”

“... Defeated Communards were executed at the cemetery wall of Père-Lachaise in the heart of working-class eastern Paris – the Mur des Fédérés, as it would be called, soon became a shrine of the Left. The question of whether or not a state funeral would stop at Notre-Dame was critical because religion was so divisive. And even when there wasn’t a quarrel ...”

“... and the pitiful economy that keeps it locked in. Despite the creation of a small millionaire class, 45 per cent of its inhabitants are below the poverty level (unable to meet basic needs). Around 15 per cent live in extreme poverty, earning less than a euro a day. Most of Kosovo’s poor are supported by networks of extended family and clan, more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by ideas of male strength and healthful activity, after the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War and the slaughters of the Paris Commune.But Caillebotte did not only paint workers: he painted bourgeois men in plenty, too, and a naked man after his bath. There is something dubious about the idea that, because Caillebotte painted men, he must have been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and so people have instead become obsessed with performance data, using it as if to fight a proxy war. Performance data aren’t necessarily a bad thing: it can be extremely helpful for teachers to look in the abstract at what their classes have been doing, so that instead of the usual jumble of humanity they see gaps and trends. The humungous datasets of the ...”

“... 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 ...”