“... illuminated by a series of fascinating case histories, on three levels: literary analysis, high-class gossip and talk-show vignettes. The literary analysis ranges from the study of Tiresias to discussions of contemporary novelists (John Cheever, Stephen Spender and many more) and films. This category often blends into the second, since much of the gossip is ...”

“... mimic the supposed rationalities of the market. In this it does not differ at bottom from the class reductionism which he rightly assaults in some marxisant academics. A harsher critic than I might well regard Posner’s economic fixation as the 13th chime of the clock, especially since Posner himself insists on the integration, in his thinking, of ...”

“... of ‘the people’ (Hafez al Asad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who during the Gulf War discovered that he, too, was descended from the Prophet); or to some mix of these. Since attributes of this kind have to exist in the eyes of the beholders, we need to understand what it is they believe they behold and why they might do so. In what are the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... enough suggests, to get away from his father and Cartesian family values. The Thirty Years War had just begun, and it was an odd time for someone who so vigorously expressed his love of repose to become a soldier. But if it was a killing time, Descartes was mainly just killing time, and, while he was a notable fencer, there is no certain evidence that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and infanticide. Cressy is not writing history from below, however. He refers to his lower-class female culprits by their first names, while his clergymen retain the respectability of their surnames. And he confuses ‘thick description’ with what he calls ‘gruesome detail’, as in the story of Lydia Downes who was a party to infanticide in ...”

“... were modelled on the comedian Jerry Lewis’s American telethon. Dystrophies belong to the class of so-called ‘orphan diseases’, conditions too rare to attract the profit-oriented attentions of the big pharmaceutical companies. The AFM decided that the best way of alleviating children’s suffering was by way of basic scientific research ...”

“... order to impose their authority. That had been the way Zanla dominated these villages during the war and it now guaranteed a monolithic Zanu vote at the polls. Christopher Soames, the British pro-consul sent out to supervise the election, knew exactly what was going on but balked at the notion of taking military action to get the guerrillas back into their ...”

“... the sullen teenager in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Merry, who runs away from her middle-class home to join the underground and plant bombs in the name of peace, is another ‘problem child’ of the 1960s – ‘chaos itself’, in Roth’s phrase. It is Merry who prompts her father, Swede Levov, to wonder despairingly: ‘What happened to our smart ...”

“... squib he had published in that year.) The windfall elevates the two of them into the rentier class, a vital qualification for those about to engage on a sustained demonstration of their stupidity. Having moved to their own place in the country, the ex-copyists are free to pursue their hitherto stifled ambitions, and to make it apparent, alas, that once a ...”

“... for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant.’ When Wellington left Wilson to go off to the Peninsular War, his campaign orders included the instruction that ‘there shall be six women to every hundred men and these shall be drawn by lot before embarkation . . . The women shall be on half rations and no wine however salt the meat.’ In a society where any kind ...”

“... politics and the media – seemed to express exactly what people felt about greed, corruption and class entitlement in the 1980s. Historians of their own lifetimes admired the thickly detailed but not soppily nostalgic way Coe defined the 1970s in The Rotters’ Club (2001): the Longbridge factory, the IRA, the NME, grammar schools, the Zep. Pleasing both ...”

“... cloves for £76. Nutmeg was so valuable that the Treaty of Breda, ending the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, delivered the tiny nutmeg island of Run to the Dutch in exchange for another island colony in America then known as New Amsterdam. When Samuel Pepys inspected a captured Dutch East India Company ship, seized in 1665, he was amazed by its ...”