“... Johnson must insist not only that all lives are unsatisfactory but that the differences of wealth, class and even of health hardly matter. ‘Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’ Those who seem comfortable are no better off than those in want; the lords who seem powerful are as uneasy as the herdsman who ...”

“... to underplay this point and he does not: ‘Of all the dumb activities in this dumb working-class school about the dumbest was shop: Elvis Presley’s major.’ Nor does Goldman intend that Elvis’s friends should do him credit. Here is a verbal snapshot of ‘lifelong friend and companion, Red West. Red is a senior at the time, a ...”

“... task of welding together a coalition of aristocracy and masses against the liberal middle class.’ Unfortunately, however, Schorske’s off-hand treatment of Lueger’s German is symptomatic: notwithstanding the (New York-born) author’s name, this distinguished scholar often seems heedless when it comes to the ever-painful question of ...”

“... times occurs today.) Cromwell’s papers were so mistreated to form the mainstay of the artificial class called ‘State Papers, Henry VIII (SP 1)’, with the result that it is nowadays often impossible to say whether a given document came from his files or not. Froude was the last historian to read the Cromwell correspondence in the original state in which ...”

“... inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about.’ What is the historical context of Medawar’s science and philosophy? He went up to Oxford, in 1932, and read ...”

“... which have made the drawing of benefit much more widely acceptable (for instance, among middle-class students and young people) than it used to be. But the clinching argument against either a trade union or a ‘poverty trap’ explanation of the rise in unemployment is that the latter is a common international phenomenon. It would be quite remarkable if ...”

“... Medieval societies which can hardly not be considered Christian, churchmen waged a continuous war against rural superstitions for many centuries: in the eighth century, St Boniface protested to the Pope about pagan celebrations of New Year’s Day in Rome itself! The argument that Christianity has left few archaeological traces is conceptually ...”

“... By birth, education and marriage, most of its main contributors are respectably upper-middle-class (Osbert Lancaster recently dubbed Ingrams ‘a terrible snob’); it was founded with private money, and now, like other flourishing firms, boasts a pension scheme and a company villa in the Dordogne. Secondly, as Patrick Marnham demonstrates in the course ...”

“... mathematical modes of operation could be a matter of very special significance. By the First World War, such analysis seemed already to suggest that mathematics and pure deductive logic were essentially the same faculty. Not only did mathematics necessarily have a structural form consisting of theorems and proofs, and leading back ultimately, by a chain of ...”

“... form of patriotism rather than rebellion’ – as it devolved from the scholar class of imperial China upon the intellectuals, and particularly the students of this century. In a succession of demonstrations, dating back to 1985, young protesters who wished to see their country develop into a modern, independent nation, put themselves at ...”

“... and rise as an exemplary fable for a commercial age, heavily reliant on its author-hero’s middle-class virtues – hard daily work, bonhomie and of course family values. Each success comes lightened by homely, humorous touches that bring out not Scott’s towering genius but his ordinariness and niceness. Before his years of fame, an Edinburgh neighbour is ...”

“... the Ancient Mariner’ in the form of the madly vengeful Ahab. If you were at a creative writing class and said you wanted to write a novel embodying the obsessive imagination of the romantic hero in the captain of a whale ship as a modern Hamlet plonked in the middle of a factory floating on the sea, your instructors would no doubt be encouraging, because ...”

“... fell to “improvements” and people squeezed out of Central and South American countries by war and poverty fought their way to “paradise” – us, LA.’ The Chateau Marmont had been ‘recarpeted, repainted, and the phones work almost too well’, ‘ugliness was merrily multiplying [and] people would forget about each other and settle for BMWs ...”

“... pleasure. He believed that ‘ready-made distractions’, incessantly marketed at the working class with manipulative advertising, meant that ‘our leisures are now as highly mechanised as our labours … [in] the sphere of play no less than the sphere of work, creation has become the privilege of a fortunate few. The common man has always had to suffer ...”

“... kiss and hardly touch. The ostensible reasons for this are social and moral. In Graziella, the class difference between the young French aristocrat and the Neapolitan fisherman’s daughter makes marriage unimaginable to both of them. In Raphaël, the eponymous hero’s beloved is married. Such obstacles have been known to melt away in the heat of ...”