“... Clarissa’s initial wanderings, there is an interruption: ‘For it was the middle of June. The War was over.’ It’s not the sort of thing Clarissa would need to tell herself, but there has to be something to tether the writing, to tell us where we are. And though it’s done with words Clarissa might use, the jumble of thoughts that surround this is ...”

“... 1917 in 1066,’ a Russian diplomat was once said to have told his British counterpart. The ruling class of England, and much of the rest of Britain, was re-created by the Norman Conquest. Most of the nobly born have at one time or another sought to find progenitors among the Companions of the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ...”

“... was good enough cloth for blankets, druggets and shirts. During the First World War, Mark Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mills produced ten million square yards of cloth and employed 2000 people. Millions of soldiers wore Dewsbury-made shirts and spent frightened nights under Spinkwell Mills blankets. The Official Guide to Dewsbury 1957 (a librarian ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which her usual tone is one of casual irony – contain trenchant expressions of disdain for the class dynamics which rendered her a ‘poverina’ among the ‘predatory rich’, welcomed into their midst as long as she remained ‘continually entertaining and at their disposal’. Greene was the chief breadwinner for her family, supporting her mother and ...”

“... leg of the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in Montevideo, demanding £38,000 worth of first-class air tickets to get there. While other poor buggers in the family were opening jumble sales in Inverness, Andy and Fergie were sniffing out freebies in the dodgiest corners of the world, as confirmed in Lownie’s remarkable catalogue of half-hidden ...”

“... across France, causing a stir. Proposals arrived from more than six hundred suitors, mostly middle-class men with aristocratic pretensions. Emperor Napoleon sent for the original letter to inspect in private. Everything ended happily when Emilie, described as 25 and ‘pretty’, married a 93-year-old count. His fortunes had tumbled with the Revolution, but he ...”

“... to civil servants or elected representatives) should be doing. In a case in 2004 arising from the war on terror, A (FC) and Others (FC) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, Lord Bingham, the senior judge on the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords (the forerunner to today’s Supreme Court), wrote that judges’ actions should be guided by the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Romantic prejudice. When Marilyn Butler published a book some years ago called Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, the very title was fighting talk: ideas, in the mannerly Austen? Charles Dickens is nowhere more unregenerately English than in his genial philistinism, allergic to anything that smacks of the doctrinal rather than the affective, while Thackeray was ...”

“... 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 distant source of the Mallory, a mysteriously ambiguous waterway which brings disease and war as it irrigates the arid wastes of the Sahara. Dr Mal, as he is now called, Sanger and Noon make their way through familiar Ballardian landscapes, their vision sharpened and estranged by the waterborne fly fever. Their craft is a stolen car ferry, allusively ...”