“... 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 ...”

“... at home, virtual pariah status abroad. While the Western media is full of resurgent Cold War rhetoric, recent polls by the Levada Centre, one of the few independent research outfits remaining in Russia, show overwhelming support – 85 per cent – for the annexation of Crimea; they also show that in November 59 per cent thought the country was ...”

“... enough in the past (though still present enough for millions of people) to be treated as the Great War might be in literary novels of the 1920s or 1930s. The counterweight to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, for instance, with her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran ...”

“... Schneider were born in 1946 and 1947 respectively, both of them into a ‘wealthy upper-middle-class background’ in the staunchly Catholic Rhine-Ruhr region.* The parents of both men benefited from Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘economic miracle’: Hütter’s father was a businessman from Krefeld, near Düsseldorf, who traded in ...”

“... her unshakeable conviction of social superiority to everyone in Hanmer. In fact, her sense of what class amounted to was remarkably pure and precise, in its South Wales way. Owning a business in a community where virtually everyone else went down the pit for wages would have seemed, in her youth, thoroughly posh. And the simple fact of not working when all ...”

“... Ford Madox Ford novel, one would be a place, the other Head of a beastly Public School for Middle-Class Girls. Kipling was adept at parody. By writing with Tennysonian or Arnoldian grandeur about the realities of Anglo-Indian life, he dramatised not only his literary ambitions but differences of attitude between the British at home and the British in ...”

“... had one of them not found its way into Hermann Goering’s private collection. At the end of the war van Meegeren (who was traced as having dealt him the picture) was charged with collaboration, and to save himself confessed to the lesser crime of forgery. The trial took place in a courtroom lined with what had till then been considered some of Holland’s ...”

“... in the dockside streets of Bristol by thugs in the pay of his brother, conveyed aboard a man of war, HMS Ruby, and strangled with a length of ship’s rope, his cravat having proved inadequate for the job. Captain Goodere and three accomplices were hanged on St Michael’s Hill in Bristol the following April. Foote immediately scented commercial potential ...”

“... 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 ...”