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“... where the injustices experienced by women and children were accorded meaning and value, and with War and Peace, where the whole premise of the book was that you couldn’t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations. That was why I loved novels, and not newspapers. That was why I wasn’t a ...”

“... name was immaterial, as indeed was everything else, their clothes, their voice, their class. She was a genuine democrat, perhaps the only one in the country. To Sir Kevin, though, it seemed that she used his name unnecessarily often, and there were times when he was sure she gave it a breath of New Zealand, that land of sheep and Sunday ...”

“... of the German penal code in 1935. Unlike other Nazi laws, this was not repealed at the end of the war. Other communities who have been oppressed – Jewish people, say, or Catholics in Northern Ireland – have every opportunity to work out the implications of their oppression in their early lives. They hear the stories; they have the books around them. Gay ...”

“... good for any poet, but especially not good for Larkin, who has in his Oxford Book waged a private war (or so it seems) on that very notion of ‘the best’. It is the nature of Larkin’s Oxford Book to act against most preconceived academic or critical or merely journalistic categorising of ‘the best’, in favour of individual ‘good poems’, the name ...”

“... of Islam to the early Christian centuries within a deliquescent Roman culture, with Augustine’s war on the world’s virtues as merely ‘splendid vices’; and from that back again to Greek and, above all, Judaic idealism, an austere and fierce feeling for absolutes. It’s not my wish to load all this onto the author of Lucky Jim. But it does remain ...”

“... Lancers; Francis, the second lord, went to Eton then served in the Ninth Lancers in the Great War; Savile, the third lord, went to Eton, served in the Ninth Lancers and became Master of the Horse; Hugh, the fourth lord, went to Eton, but dodged the Ninth Lancers; his four-year-old son, John, who will be the fifth lord, rides a tricycle with what looks ...”

“... I think it runs the risk of tying Pissarro’s account of time too closely to a single set of class experiences, but he himself would probably have assented to it – that the character of time felt for in Le Champ de choux is that of ‘agriculture’ or ‘peasant economy’. Time passes in that economy, for sure; light thickens, bodies begin to ache ...”

“... woodwork from the period. The curator who acquires it, Harold Clifford Smith, is an upper-middle-class Englishman straight out of central casting: the son of a wine merchant, educated at public school and Oxford, devoted to his old college, a regular contributor to Country Life. During the Great War, he serves in the ...”

“... perceives it, is quite plain. He wants to buy what cannot, in the end, be bought – authentic class. To watch him trying to pull it off is risible: the chairmanship of posher-than-posh Harrods, the castle in Scotland, the sponsoring of royal horse shows, the tarting-up of the old Windsor house in Paris – it is all so laughably transparent. And look what ...”

“... destroyed after being folded into the Nazi-Vichy administrative system during the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco to set up the United Nations. It hadn’t originally been scheduled to discuss a separate body for health, but a Chinese medic and diplomat’s son called Szeming Sze managed to push it onto the ...”

“... that took her feeling for language as evidence of madness. When she compared herself to Pierre in War and Peace, her doctors thought she was describing a schizophrenic delusion. ‘I inhabited a territory of loneliness,’ she later wrote, ‘which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return ...”

“... In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the ...”

“... he gleaned limited: ‘So far as your actual caretaking was concerned,’ he reported to the class, ‘it was bollocks.’ The lecturer consoled himself with the hope that, unknown to the caretaker, the evening might have opened doors. In this he was right: the doors in question belonged to the Ransomes’ flat. The police came round eventually, though ...”

“... own part. ‘The biggest Confidence Trick by a British Government since the Second World War’ is how the Combined Flood Group describes the government’s guidance for councils on building on flood plains. ‘Loss of the life [sic] comes third in the government’s priority.’ In Tewkesbury in general there is more hostility towards the ...”

“... law. For Leila Ahmed, it is institutional and legal Islam, determined by the politically dominant class, that has acted consistently against women. Ghada Karmi reads the Quran itself as two texts: one regulatory, which arises out of the conditions of the time, and the other universal, spiritual and philosophical, a guide to the inner life which by definition ...”