“... a group of ill-assorted travelling companions easing reluctantly into conversation in Headlong Hall, he was sure of raising a smile by making the topic on which they eventually settle ‘those various knotty points of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English conversation’. By this point in her narrative, however, Harris has her work cut ...”

“... Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, written with Catherine Hall and published in 1987. It would be good to know more about family traditions among labourers in the 19th century, but their lives have left fewer traces and Davidoff admits that her decision to leave out the working classes was largely dictated by ‘the ...”

“... technology, complicated and unreliable even with ‘a remote control concealed in my watch (very James Bond)’; there are the clumsy mortifications of everyday life; and there is the spectre of oneself in coming years as a ‘damper on every party, a dud at every dinner table. A grandfather unable to communicate with his growing grandchildren, in the ...”

“... One refers to the public human being, as when you say: ‘I’ll meet you in front of Carnegie Hall at a quarter to eight.’ The other refers to the subject of consciousness, as when you think, ‘I hear an oboe,’ or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The argument of the book proceeds from phenomenology – an introspective examination of the subjective character ...”

“... his life. On 3 February, as a prelude to the Brexit trade talks, he gave a speech in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A ...”

“... of the working classes in the second half of the 20th century: ‘the telly, the car, the bingo hall … eating fish and chips in Spain’. The laughter of the Cheltenham audience is tinged with shock that he should be quite so sneering. In the second lecture, discussing the unfortunate consequences of Eliot’s ‘Francophilia’ and referring to his essay ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... Its projection of ‘Cool Britannia’ failed. The popular culture it referred to, as Stuart Hall pointed out, was ‘too “multicultural” and too “Black British” or “Asian crossover” or “British hybrid” for New Labour’s more sober, corporate-managerialist English style’. The only alternative was populist nationalism. In 2010, Gavin ...”

“... manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in ...”

“... great radical historian of rural and working-class England, and the Jamaican social thinker Stuart Hall, who would later become known as one of the founders of cultural studies. The Young Turks had only affection and respect for Hall, but relations with Thompson were often difficult and eventually he left. He was a brilliant ...”

“... England a little nicer and lovelier by helping to found the community and school at Dartington Hall, in Devon. He was a withdrawn, shy boy, on whom the impact of friendship and common intellectual excitement at Cambridge was enormous. When James Klugman and John Cornford, the Panza and Quixote of Cambridge student ...”

“... Blake died a decade before Victoria came to the throne. I am bound therefore to think that James Turner (who ‘teaches history’, the back flap says, ‘at the University of Massachusetts, Boston’) is mistaken in his central thesis that the Victorians witnessed ‘the emergence of a new, distinctively modern sensibility’ about animals. His ...”

“... of keeping the faith. Preeminently a man whose ‘disciples were among his best works’, as Sir James Mackintosh put it, he exerted a unique influence upon the Whig political world of the early 19th century – Palmerston and Russell among the grandees, Horner and Brougham among the men of talent who made the Edinburgh Review their instrument. Whatever else ...”

“... He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than his beloved Henry James) and meets the love of his life, a unique Greek called Nikos Stangos. The boys were fascinated by Bloomsbury – the books, the people, the scarves, the gossip – which led them to venerate Stephen Spender as one of its last links. Squeezed into a narrow ...”