“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”