“... on it. There was no Facebook or Twitter, there were no smartphones to hunch over. The managerial class looked at early websites and tried to put them into existing categories: this one was a bit like an encyclopedia, that one was a bit like a library, this one was basically a mail order catalogue, and that one, well, it was just a newspaper, wasn’t ...”

“... control. Congress can neither limit the effect of his pardon, nor exclude from its exercise any class of offenders. The benign prerogative of mercy reposed in him cannot be fettered by any legislative restrictions. It was described in 1871 as a power granted ‘without limit’. Later, in 1925, Chief Justice Taft spoke for a unanimous court in a case of ...”

“... revealed to visiting and expatriate Americans from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, and after World War Two they returned to see if it was still as it had been. In 1929, the young M.F.K. Fisher had her initiation chez Aux Trois Faisans in Dijon – ‘safe in a charmed gastronomical circle’, having ‘seen the far shores of another world’. In the 1950s, the ...”

“... score an easy triumph by anticipating the answer with some textbook formula.’ The First World War, which killed Raymond and many of his playmates, provides the inevitable coda to their story: spattering the beautiful dream with blood, rendering the past futile, and disarranging the future. In its aftermath came the collapse of the aristocratic ...”

“... understanding, and opened my eyes to what can go on between two men of different ages and class and character: At that self same instant that M. de Charlus passed through the gateway whistling like a fat bumblebee, another one, a real one this time, entered the courtyard. Who knows whether it was not the one so long awaited by the orchid, that had ...”

“... de menthe. We had to dance with her father, who’d been wounded as a sapper in the First World War: either he had his “arms” on, with black gloves, or he couldn’t be bothered to put them on and we just had to dance with the stumps.’Miss Popham, the headmistress of Cheltenham College, ‘during a Scripture lesson on the First Book of Samuel, went on ...”

“... died at the age of seven. His father died soon after, leaving enough money for an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Dahl was then only three. He survived the beatings and misery of an English boarding school and got a job with Shell. When war broke out he volunteered as a fighter pilot. He had a bad crash-landing in Libya ...”

“... of anxiety and of purpose runs through the successive generations of the 17th-century ruling class. Yet amidst the pronounced similarities between the three crises there were differences too. The cry, voiced so often at the crisis of Charles II’s reign, that ‘Forty-One is come again’ shows that contemporaries interpreted the bewildering events ...”

“... terms by two years – a move which many see as the determination of the new political class to cling to office for as long as possible. Yeltsin’s memoirs don’t make it much easier to understand the contradictions. They are much more readable and interesting than those the notables of the Gorbachev era wrote, but that isn’t saying much. The ...”

“... serious interest, which means that three of the six sitting PS Deputies have to be dumped: virtual war between the six and their clients ensues. On the right the situation is no easier. Le Pen’s Front National (FN) is bound to take 8-9 per cent and thus one of the seats, but the Giscardian Centre-Right, the UDF, will run its own list and probably get 20 per ...”

“... dense woman who at the time she met Mew had just published a novel featuring the mixed gymnastics class at the Marylebone Polytechnic and was engaged in setting up the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London. Mew made, if not a pass (Mrs Fitzgerald is stern with Sinclair’s biographer, Theophilus Boll, who computed the number of times she bounded over the ...”

“... than its American manifestation does a Harvard Book. But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic Emersonian in ...”

“... mother as kind and stoical, a maker of puddings and cheesecakes who came into her own during the war when she knitted socks for the troops. She knitted Betty an oatmeal and orange cardigan which she wore for thirty years. After Veda died, Betty arranged for thousands of daffodils to be planted in the grounds of the local primary school for the children to ...”

“... Until then, Baba Amro was considered a ‘liberated neighbourhood’.It’s the sort of working-class neighbourhood at the outskirts of the city where the middle classes normally never set foot, a neighbourhood of four or five-storey concrete buildings, sometimes covered in sheets of polished stone and usually unfinished, each squeezed up next to the other ...”

“... powers of explanation and illumination. It is sad to realise that his is no longer a (middle-class) household name. This popularising suggests in flickers what his more formal essays, decidedly not written for the general music-lover, achieve with mastery: an overview of the language and workings of classical tonality that remains unequalled in lucid ...”