“... silicon eyeballs and pricey MRS degrees from Stanford. Not to mention the usual klatsch of ruling-class hangers-on: radical Botoxers; Pilates Instructors for Peace and Zero Body Fat; members of the pedicure-rights community – all Teetering-for-Hillary in black sheath dresses and fuck-me pumps. Since it takes a village, we anticipate, too, the requisite ...”

“... the Convivio, written in his first years of exile, the nobility is assessed more positively as a class which, despite being infiltrated and corrupted by merchants and moneymen, has the duty of providing the community with a peaceful, civilised existence under the auspices of the empire. This shift in position, which now recognises the value of noble birth ...”

“... with time and/or funds and/ or stamina running out. While no serious artist ever wants gender or class or any other contingency or circumstance adduced as any sort of an excuse for anything, it’s also a fact that The Last Samurai is a novel in which we witness WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING? the captivating sibylline voice continually interrupted by that of the ...”

“... of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was reinstated on condition that he took a special test every three years. He managed to ...”

“... sympathy with the scale of what he is describing, the medium of it, and its purpose. The idea of a class or even of a whole population taking ship to better itself, or even to survive, will have been disagreeable to him, with his promotion of passivity and his feudal and static playing-card version of society. It wasn’t in him to see desperate emigrants as ...”

“... nor does standard scene-setting. The siblings attend a school where a teacher can be bullied in class by oblique references to her son, who has been arrested on suspicion of killing farm animals (including a lamb that Rosa watched learning to walk), something that strongly suggests a rural community, but no attempt is made to describe or evoke the ...”

“... the name of the town in which the Karamazovs live?’ was the sort of question he liked to ask his class, rather than anything more existential. When Mason wanted to write about Joyce and the ideas of the philosopher Giambattista Vico, which might seem a perfectly good idea given Joyce’s professed interest in him, Ellmann dismissed it out of hand: ‘all ...”

“... You were ill, but you might not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into ...”

“... had a brief and stormy career, in Paris, in the years around the outbreak of the First World War. His chief influences were Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry and the Italian Futurists; he preceded by a few years the Dadaists and Surrealists, who acclaimed him a pioneering figure. He was, André Breton said, a ‘barometer’ of the avant-garde. As a heavyweight ...”

“... formally charged with murder, and the trial, which finally began on 16 January 2009, a propaganda war raged between those who sided with the prosecution and Knox’s supporters – the ‘innocentisti’ and the ‘colpevolisti’, as they were soon termed. The report prepared by Judge Matteini for the pretrial was leaked to the Italian press, which gleefully ...”

“... to learn, on pain of death, the conjugation of various auxiliary verbs. Called to the front of the class, he soon makes a gross mistake in the dual of the aorist, and instantly suffers the threatened punishment. During his lifetime, despite the howls of derision his work regularly inspired, Roussel steadfastly refused to offer either explanation or ...”

“... Dray makes the point in a closely-argued piece on conflicting interpretations of the English Civil War. Historians come up with all manner of methodical checks and contrivances to give their narratives some semblance of objective truth. In fact, these refinements of method are always embedded in a larger sense of what properly counts as convincing historical ...”

“... rarely happens,’ he said to Boswell, ‘that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points at issue what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that the client might fairly do for himself.’ And ...”

“... is now a parking lot. The 1980s were a tumultuous time. Saudi Shia suffered badly in the tug of war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Countless numbers were arrested and tortured; many more fled or disappeared. The crackdown left a permanent scar. Shia were required to be loyal citizens without being treated as such. They began to feel the effects of ...”

“... books have often taught other truths – that the best thing you can be is white, upper or middle class, and if you are a girl, quiet. Many have taught children to revere the aristocracy, conquer the wilderness and condescend to the poor. Our girl heroes have nearly always been thin, and their thinness offered as a shorthand for their spare clarity of ...”