“... a secure chronological framework while they ventured forth into the vast unknowns of social class, religious denomination and regional culture. Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) was a landmark here, and we now possess histories of feminism, pacifism, of the movements against slavery and ...”

“... opinions. He is provoked by young Higgins arguing that Stephen Crane is not writing about war but about ‘the emotional and intellectual maturing of a young man’. Smiricky reads out a military passage from Crane’s book, The Red Badge of Courage (mentally comparing the fiction with a real-life experience in the 1940s), but then he is distracted by ...”

“... Theory; and from its birth in the Weimar Republic to its later flight to New York and post-war return to Frankfurt, it sustained a tenacious if turbulent institutional existence through the advent of Fascism, the defeat of socialism, the Second World War and the ideological freeze-over which followed on its ...”

“... decay of the commonwealth.’ In the matter of clothing, the sumptuary laws of the Second World War were directed at less dandiacal, but still state-threatening, indulgences: double-breasted jackets, double cuffs, turn-ups of all kinds, patch pockets, bellows pockets, belts, yokes, pleats, shirrs, flaps, tabs and all unnecessary adornment (one historian ...”

“... Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh.’ He was an ‘unusually ...”

“... except that it is directed against the Red Flag. Some of the irony detected in this, by the pundit class and by reliable supporters of the President and Prime Minister, is superficial. In several of the countries of Eastern Europe, and potentially in Russia also, the wave of emancipation contains ideas that are not at all alien to Eurosocialism, and to the ...”

“... of roving adviser to the committees that set up national insurance schemes before the First World War, and then as government actuary with an office in the Treasury from 1917, he took a red pen to anything that smacked of profligacy or radicalism. In the cause of fiscal rectitude he could be creative too, teaming up with the then minister of health, Neville ...”

“... years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown ...”

“... At college I took a class in writing short stories. It’s a long time ago, but it stands out among the things that were happening to me at the time; and have happened, or not happened, since. The instructor always wanted us to be dry and precise. No gush please was his watchword. I was feeling pretty dry myself, so I thought I should be able to manage that ...”

“... two Jewish families, the Katzes and the Gordons, fled from Odessa and settled in pre-First World War Liverpool. Within their ethnic class and shared past they are markedly different. The Gordons are adaptable and individualistic – sharp even against each other. The Katzes are a warmer, happier, less steady family. The ...”

“... W. Burgess, and a future Los Angeles segregated along the stratifying dimensions of land value, class, race and fear. A ‘Core City’ homeless containment zone sits at the centre of an inner city surrounded by a circle of decaying blue-collar suburbs, then a gated-suburban, edge-city, outer ring, and finally a ‘gulag rim’ of prisons. The map is dotted ...”

“... relations to the effect that the problems facing the country in the aftermath of the Second World War were such that no government would be able to address them without losing popularity, so that the Conservatives could plausibly look forward to being returned as the unintended beneficiaries next time round. It was, in its way, a prophetic remark. But the ...”

“... a free citizen of the Anglo-American world. But if I seek to know what was really done in the Cold War dark, I must attend upon someone who was a criminal in that war. My ‘own side’ has no intention of enlightening me, and the spook industry has built up such an oligopoly in journalism and publishing that no untainted ...”

“... that he deliberately avoided work on the late Thirties). The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War was to have formed part of the larger work, the remains of which (including the effects of Stalin’s terror on the Comintern) will eventually find their way into print. But when Carr began to falter as cancer fastened its grip in 1981, Tamara Deutscher ...”

“... in prestige and authority’. The major theme of the book, then, is how disorienting it was for a class driven by a passion for wealth and status to lose it, to become bystanders in the endless struggle for worldly advancement. And the first essay, a long, general and highly suggestive one about the early 19th century, seeks to discover how that wealth and ...”