“... 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 ...”

“... among the Young Hegelians and other left-wing intellectuals, the attention of the local middle-class elite, and the hostility of the Prussian state. What made his name more widely was an article advocating freedom of the press, enthusiastically welcomed by liberals of all kinds across Prussia. But an article blaming the plight of winegrowing peasants in ...”

“... ancient historians have never had much time for Marx. They tie themselves in knots to avoid class-based analyses, recasting what can look an awful lot like class in terms of something else (status, say, or ‘social stratification’); or they dismiss class as an analytical category ...”

“... who couldn’t afford Corfu. In The Crack: A Belfast Year 1 Sally Belfrage notes: ‘A look at the class-composition’ of the Twelfth procession was ‘to see overwhelmingly the poor, albeit with the gentry to the fore, and it ill becomes middle-class snobs to sneer at this celebration of who they were.’ I was deserting ...”

“... only applied in the boroughs, and it only applied to men; but it certainly gave the urban working-class electorate the chance to dispossess the bourgeois politicians who now had to seek its favour. Instead, within seven years of the Second Reform Act, the Conservatives under Disraeli achieved their first electoral majority in a generation. Moreover, when the ...”

“... problems. He was born in 1944, the son of a police detective and an Afrikaner mother of working-class stock. He grew up in Johannesburg and its adjoining townships and, from a young age, lived face to face with the barrack-like buildings that once housed the black mineworkers. Miners came to dominate both his early life and his historical perspectives. One ...”

“... under concerted opposition from unionists, which included a general strike. Eamonn McCann’s War and an Irish Town was published some months later. It is an account of how the working-class revolution McCann had hoped to bring about in Derry in 1968 developed, by the early 1970s, into sectarian warfare. Reissued last ...”

“... amazingly successfully – with the one exception of needlessly provoking the Americans into the War of Independence. Enriched by the spoils of the monasteries in the 16th century, the ruling families were basically in place by 1660, and thereafter proceeded to create a state, a legal system, a church and an army to suit their needs: they manned them ...”

“... knees – and disabled by his stammer, he was bullied as a Naval cadet and came bottom of his class at Osborne. He lived always in the shadow of his glamorous and favoured elder brother. Yet as he grew up he accepted his humbler role in the royal pageant and discharged it diligently and loyally. Despite ill-health he was determined to serve in the Navy ...”

“... ever, stop to say: ‘Let me put the thing in’ – or ‘on’. The 193 elderly, mostly working-class English women and men whose recollections form the raw material of Kate Fisher’s book would have had little trouble understanding this omission. Caps and condoms were messy, uncomfortable, expensive and required a kind of calculation that turned intimacy ...”

“... Czechs and Slovaks are close to breaking up the state that was the one working democracy in inter-war Central and Eastern Europe. Of the organised thuggery in Romania and the civil wars in the Caucasus and Yugoslavia the less said the better. East European critics of Western admirers of Gorbachev (or Yeltsin) attribute this admiration to continuing naivety ...”

“... for profit. One chorus takes up the theme that programming remains ‘elitist’ and ‘middle class’, another that it has become demotic and debased. Many people seem to feel that so long as The Archers and the shipping forecast are left untouched, then all is right with the world; others seem to think that the problem is precisely that The Archers and ...”

“... wing ear’ for dialogue. According to Cockburn, who often drank with him during the war, this caused him to startle violently at unexpected moments. ‘My God,’ he would say, abruptly tuned in to someone standing eight feet away with his back to them, ‘don’t you see the sort of thing he is up to? God help us.’ If he wasn’t of the ...”

“... is concerned with the final integration of the hero’s metropolitan present with his working-class Welsh childhood. The novel concludes, homiletically, with the following exchange:   ‘It was bound to be a difficult journey.’   ‘Yes certainly. Only now it seems like the end of exile. Not going back, but the feeling of exile ending. For the ...”

“... what George Orwell, an old Etonian, called in The Road to Wigan Pier the ‘lower-upper-middle-class’, his family’s shabby-genteel world peopled by clerics, servicemen and Anglo-Indian officials who were reduced to living on ‘virtually working-class incomes’. Pratt’s antecedents are in trade and business and ...”