“... points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness and rancour are the hallmarks of sporting clubs and authorities, and sometimes of individual sportsmen too. Sport seems to license people to behave badly in a way they could not hope ...”

“... interest in steeplechasing, cricket and poetry and also perhaps through a shared experience of war, though my father’s had been briefer and much less horrific.So with Siegfried’s blessing for a couple of hours on a misty November afternoon we patrolled the undulating woods that he had planted up behind Heytesbury House when he bought it, flush for the ...”

“... fellows. The craze for collecting gnomes grew among the upper classes until the First World War put the kibosh on anything German. In the 1930s they staged a comeback lower down the social scale, appearing in suburban and municipal gardens, bent over their spades and forks in regulation red hats and green waistcoats (John Major’s father was a ...”

“... not so easily depicted as a faint-heart – lamented in the aftermath of the First World War that, while the cataclysm had transformed the rest of Europe, the Ulster question remained as intractable as ever and politicians would once more have to pay attention to the ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’. Fifty years and another world ...”

“... here means the revolutionary masses, and ‘object’ something like history or class-society, the epistemological is also the political. How far is change up to us, and how far is it constrained by objective conditions? Pushed too far, the former keels over into voluntarism, and the latter into determinism. The combination of these two ...”

“... garage in Poland.With the spring thaw, Chekh’s unit was ordered to advance using the First World War-style tactics developed by the Ukrainian army to chip away at the separatists’ hold on a corner of Donbass in south-eastern Ukraine: digging trenches into no man’s land under shell fire until, as Chekh says, ‘in your binoculars you can see the barcode ...”

“... extent to which an effective and adequately funded public sector is necessary to British middle-class life. The middle classes not only use the public transport system disproportionately: they also have access to a huge ‘middle-class’ welfare state. To Mrs Thatcher the welfare state is exclusively for the working ...”

“... was on the cards? Certainly this claim was explicit in The Making of the English Working Class. And though the buoyancy and optimism of the 1960s which helped to make Thompson’s book have receded, its influence and example have not. Indeed the obligation to study past radicalism felt by many socialist historians, and (to borrow one of Roger ...”

“... Must social policy be boring? After all, economic policy still keeps people awake while the phoney war between neo-Keynesians and monetarists lasts. Political policy (sit venia verba) continues to excite the adherents and opponents of adversary politics. Educational policy naturally interests the new educational class which dominates the journals and the universities ...”

“... hardest to get into of all in France, in 1939, but became a student there only at the end of the war, at the late age of 27. He never had to leave it, because after having achieved a brilliant agrégation he stayed on as the caïman or tutor in philosophy. He taught in the rue d’Ulm, very conscientiously by all accounts, and he lived there, at first ...”

“... he points out that the BBC’s That Was the Week That Was was watched by a quarter of the upper class but less than 20 per cent of the working class, a statistic which looks less dramatic when you work out the difference between a quarter and 20 per cent. The comfortingly conservative Dixon of Dock Green’s regular ...”

“... lesser officials had slightly different problems. They had been a buoyant group before 1914, but war, revolution and inflation brought new anxieties and sharpened old ones. The white collar ‘little man’ of Hans Fallada’s bestselling novel began to lose out. Differentials with manual workers were eroded, and many of the old social certainties ...”

“... wealth but in the celebration of the race itself. Never mind the yawning differences in education, class, or life prospects; any talented American who works hard will grow rich. And always the cold corollary: if you failed, you’re a loser and have only your inadequate self to blame. Scott Sandage has written a splendid book about this American madness. He ...”

“... intellectual experience was of the economic and political crisis of Europe, and of middle-class attachment to right-wing or downright fascist palliatives. In the US, they observed the domestication of European technologies of control and organisation, and the rapidly changing relationship between machines and men, politics and economics. Greif shows ...”

“... world as well, has been one of the most remarkable cultural developments since the Second World War. The reasons for its triumph are instructive, not least to historians of Britain, whose own discipline has so conspicuously declined in popularity over the same period of time. Some of the credit must go to a succession of scholars, Philippe Ariès, Fernand ...”