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“... the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social class. Wheatley suffered from a sickly adoration of the rich and well-born, and a contrasting suspicion of the masses and any political system that allowed them any influence. One of the odder pieces of writing he produced was a ‘letter to posterity’ – it ...”

“... new novel, like her last one, The Beginning of Spring, is set just before the First World War. Its locale, 1912 Cambridge, is not much less exotic than its predecessor’s Moscow, but it is entirely convincing: Fitzgerald’s pre-1914 worlds are wonderfully circumstantial. The book is short and full of activity. The story moves swiftly in unexpected ...”

“... or ‘How fantastically modern!’? It was not till some years after the Second World War that ‘pitbrew girls’ ceased to do the heavy and dirty work of separating out dross from coal; many of them became canteen workers instead. Joe Gormley was, and is, firmly against the idea of any ‘modern young ladies’ trying to secure coal-face ...”

“... Between 1946 and 1964, a period known as La Violencia in Colombia, a proxy war between mostly peasant partisans of the Liberal and Conservative Parties resulted in so many deaths that, in order for terror to have any effect, ever more sadistic methods of torture had to be dreamed up. In the mountains and hot valleys west of Bogotá, new styles of mutilation entered the argot: the ‘necktie cut’ involved pulling the victim’s tongue through a slit in the throat, while in the ‘florist’s cut’ severed limbs were arranged in the open cavity of the neck following decapitation ...”

“... so important at the time. Both the books discussed here describe the strike as more like a civil war than an industrial dispute. It began in March 1984 and ended a year later, after a majority of the miners had gone back to work over the preceding months, disillusioned, scared by the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state ...”

“... of their hegemony and the respect due to their guardianship’. The coherence of the ruling class, and the close relations between patron and artist, both in assertive mood, lend credence to her thesis. The ‘grammars’ investigated by other contributors range from that governing posture in Classical Greece to that governing masculinity in ...”

“... of A.A. Milne and Pooh Bear, when they were very young. The atmosphere of enlightened upper-middle-class fun and games, in a new world where to be young was very heaven, suffuses Rupert Brooke’s life and letters, sometimes rather sickeningly so; and it produces a lot of sticky passages in E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View and The Longest ...”

“... London Season: ‘Every tart in London can get in.’ Kynaston appreciates the respect for working-class values which he associates with the work of Williams, Young and Richard Hoggart, and before that of D.H. Lawrence, and which would appear here to have followed on a spell of postwar indifference. The working class is ...”

“... but, like the woman in Belloc’s poem, ‘not before/Becoming an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and modernism; he was a bit old for service, but he was courageous, and, even when sober, enthusiastic for the cause. Unfortunately, his fellow ...”

“... as well as to approach with imaginative sympathy that least sympathetic of human activities, war, which provided the raison d’être for the parfyt and gentle knight. In looking both narrowly and sympathetically at his subject, the historian imitates the knights themselves, who noted at least the external signs of knighthood with the eyes of practised ...”

“... took hold as a style in the Depression because it was anchored in the despair of the middle class, their savings sunk in real estate and oil speculations, as they volatilised in a downward spiral of crisis and bankruptcy. Chandler’s Marlowe, in his stale office in Downtown, snarling alternately at the punk scum and the powers-that-be, was a political ...”

“... the way the other did it. An unexpected common factor can probably be found in their attitudes to class, or at least to the ways in which individual members of the English intelligentsia (itself a barely analysable concept) adjusted to the peculiar pressure and response of the English class system. Lewis, who came from ...”

“... Scotland and England’s shared Protestant interests a guiding concern, but Scotland’s ruling class were major investors in the Darien Company and signed away their independence in 1707 with financial as well as spiritual salvation in mind.As partners rather than competitors in the empire market, Scots proved fast learners. It was two enterprising ...”

“... By the time Friedrich Engels arrived in England in the winter of 1842, the country already had a class warrior of its own. One of Engels’s new neighbours in downtown Manchester had spent the summer warning his countrymen of imminent social catastrophe. ‘It is my firm belief,’ Richard Cobden told the House of Commons in July, ‘that within six months we shall have populous districts in the north in a state of social dissolution ...”

“... is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the war, even in the end his Church, turn out to be illusions. So instead of becoming an English Montherlant he falls in love with the people he formerly satirised, thinks his country is being regenerated and then betrayed during the ...”