“... and answer his own question with ‘Because it does.’ Anthony’s parents were solidly middle class, his father ‘an Italian Irish pugnacious race warrior’ who taught African American history and literature in private schools, his mother a Black woman whose family owned businesses in Mobile and Birmingham. When Anthony was expelled from Columbia for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... him so obsessed with sin in all its forms that when he was given a ration of whiskey as a Civil War soldier, he poured it on the ground to prevent anyone from drinking it. It was Comstock who in 1873 persuaded legislators to pass the Act for the Suppression of the Trade in and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, usually known as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... others, Dickens, Propertius and Pierre Guyotat’s monstrously abject and disjointed Algerian War memoirs. Running through the middle, as Kraus says, was a stream of grotesquely skewed autobiography: ‘the threat and promise of inheritance … like the River Styx’.It was a bit from Great Expectations that Kraus herself saw Acker perform at the Mudd ...”

“... of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction. It is also – especially in the phrase ‘best available science’ – very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for ...”

“... she didn’t like to say, but she told a former teacher she’d got the idea from his folklore class; to someone else she remarked that ‘of course’ the story was ‘about the Jews’; and to others she said it wasn’t fiction at all, but ‘simply North Bennington’, the Vermont town in which she lived, and the people there, ‘the way they slaughter ...”

“... girl, you only have to ask your mother, but I was never expelled from school.’ During the recent war and after, my father had busied himself wheeling and dealing in the black market. He’d cooked at least one set of accounting books that had him in prison before I was old enough to remember, and somehow or other gone bankrupt more than once. Between the ...”

“... the impulse to say that we were from the North and that the Confederacy was the enemy in the war we’d won, or that someone who wore the symbol of American white supremacy out in public perhaps deserved to ‘get jumped’. Though I’d read about Trump supporters shouting ‘Sieg heil!’ at his Southern rallies, I was surprised to see Confederate flag ...”

“... connection made in Britain. Inevitably we are told that this is to assist in the so-called ‘war against paedophiles, drug traffickers and organised criminal gangs’. But reciting the mantra of evil ones is not enough to justify the powers desired. No doubt the planners of this legislation are entirely confident that whatever limited niche they allot ...”

“... the buoyant state of the American economy. But the opposite could also be true. Our ‘political class’ may have felt so free to indulge itself in this orgy of partisanship because times are good and dangers seem remote. Certainly no Republican Congress would have attempted to ‘hunt and destroy’ a Democratic President during the Cold ...”

“... unteachable. In 1900, he attended the classes of Eugène Carrière. An Englishman in the same class, Vernon Blake, described an encounter between pupil and teacher: ‘Pardon me, M. Carrière,’ interposed Matisse, ‘but you have not corrected my study!’ ‘Haven’t I? I beg your pardon’ ... He placed himself before the astonishing medley of ...”

“... as a source of cash. For a taste of the discomforts attaching to his position, sample the brutal class scorn directed against him by the Earl of Rochester after they had fallen out in the mid-1670s: ‘He is a Rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a Hog that could fiddle, or a singing Owl.’ Various of his relations and acquaintances were ...”

“... organising for themselves be absorbed into the Labour Party, which he saw as too preoccupied with class and economic inequality. He also wanted to devolve economic power by means of industrial democracy and workers’ control, on a model pioneered in 1976 by the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Combine Committee, which had formed to contest job cuts but ended by ...”