“... was a cheesy international success, but the follow-up, Carte Blanche, degenerated into a tug of war as Tynan refused to heed the requests, suggestions and anguished pleas of those who wanted him to cut his own contribution, a playlet called ‘Triangle’, which, they said, didn’t fit the revue format and brought everything to a talky stop. Tynan was ...”

“... who didn’t do anything about her little brown teeth. In that respect they’re like the working-class people who love them.’ ‘They can’t help it,’ I said. ‘Yes they can. They’re just out of touch. Everybody’s got fabulous teeth now. Diana had great teeth. These skinny men are all a terrible throwback.’ ‘With bad teeth.’ ‘Yeah. Toilet ...”

“... extinguished the genre. Yeats tries to revive it in his sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, but his theme – the decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy – and his too muscle-bound style always remind me of Stormont. It’s Protestant arrogance with a touch of Mussolini (or ‘Missolonghi’, as Yeats called him). But he gets it right in ‘In ...”

“... in 1819, ‘except poor dear me – I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war.’ Byron used the same tactics towards society at large as he used with women. There is a curious mixture of apparent indifference and real avidity in his attitude to social success, which Raphael understands and describes very well. ‘The more society ...”

“... Italy, in the early years of the century. The territory was fought over in the Second World War, and Anna’s own father is a shadowy Eighth Army officer described only as ‘plump and clumsy and mostly bald’. It is her grandfather’s life which appeals to her imagination, a life which she considers ‘lost’ because she is so anxious to recover ...”

“... of the ‘professional’ philosophical reaction; it reveals as much about the diversity of post-war philosophy as about the gulf between Marxism and analytical philosophy. Modern linguists, literary theorists, some dissident social scientists, were much more open to these European influences; that they made so little headway elsewhere merely proved what an ...”

“... Hawksmoor’s building: ‘I’ve never raped. I’ve never mugged. I’ve never robbed a working-class home.’ As he sank away towards the underworld of the crypt, we ascended the hierarchical steps to hear music by Messiaen and Hans Werner Henze. The frisson was undeniable. Earlier this year I went back to visit the disused synagogue at 19 Princelet Street ...”

“... Cornell spent most of his life at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary ...”

“... Woodcut’, Boyle remarks that ‘English poetry, whose vehicle is the language of a profoundly class-conscious culture, lacks the middle tone between verse and doggerel in which this poem like most of Faust, is written.’ Many people have wondered why it is so hard to get Goethe to sound even creditable in English, let alone like a major poet, and this is ...”

“... the world go round. Mandeville makes it clear that he is thinking of the way that wild young upper-class males, out on the town, promote the circulation of wealth. The antinomy is between virtuous frugality on the one hand, and luxury on the other, where luxury still carries its old close association with lechery, and such luxury is not exactly identifiable ...”

“... or fugitive publishers, Williams won coterie acclaim by the end of the 1920s, and after World War Two, with much wider support from critics and trade publishers, he became a pre-eminent influence on all sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a ...”

“... that overdiagnosis is a sign of a broken welfare system that is creating what Farage calls a ‘class of victims’, but you could argue just as easily that it is a consequence of free-market ideology. Annemarie Mol, a Dutch philosopher, writes in The Logic of Care (2008) that patients are harmed when a ‘logic of choice’ supplants a ‘logic of ...”

“... somewhat of an examination, as though it was not the author of The Cossacks, ‘Pace-setter’ and War and Peace whom I had met but a nobleman who, in condescending to my level, had deemed it necessary to address me ‘in peasantese’, the language of the streets and marketplaces, and this upset my impression of him – one that I had cherished for so ...”

“... less sardonic than quizzical.Colwin was born in 1944 in Manhattan and grew up in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Long Island, Chicago and Philadelphia. Her father, Peter, was a director of the United Jewish Appeal and her mother, Estelle, worked as an art consultant while running a home that Colwin described as ‘even more bourgeois’ than her own (and ...”

“... teacher, I haven’t yet adopted the practice of the ‘pronoun round’: going around a class or tutorial asking for everyone’s preferred pronouns. My reasoning has been that the respectful way to address someone in the third person in their presence is by using their name, as in: ‘Does anyone have an answer to Mary’s excellent ...”