“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now have makes a general history all the more useful, and not only, as Evans suggests, for those who know little about the subject. Evans, a social historian, aims to cover ‘not only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stones At Horses, People, Passing Trains But specially at Window-panes. Like many of the Upper Class, He liked the sound of Broken Glass. To this last line is appended the footnote: A line I stole with subtle daring From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring. Though in his time Baring was the author of some sixty books, and had a collected edition of his works ...”

“... Populist movement against corporate power and political corruption, and sides with the working class in a chapter subtitled ‘The Class Struggle in America’, which not only celebrates such working-class heroes as Frank Little and Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth ...”

“... mere liberal – ‘this is a pluralism which is always located within the hegemony of the working class.’ To the class-enemy, all this good news will look like evasion. What about the opposition desirous of locating itself outside ‘the hegemony of the working class’? How long is ...”