“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the planning of the lunches and dinners presented to her guests. In those days every middle-class household expected to employ at least two or three domestic servants; and the Webbs were not short of money. In the diary there are occasional references to secretaries and research workers, and one or two ‘maids’ are also incidentally mentioned by ...”

“... every morning and evening. Kobe’s death and destruction were concentrated in the solidly working-class ward of Nagata, a centre of Japanese shoe production. Before it was levelled, Nagata was home to about half of Kobe’s 20,000 Korean residents, as well as Japan’s largest ghetto of burakumin. The word means ‘hamlet people’ though its mere mention ...”

“... determining factor there was Bevan’s recognition that the new system would never work unless the class enemy, the BMA, could be persuaded to buy into it: not such a romantic story. The key to understanding Lloyd George is knowing that he was a spoiled child, adored by his family, whence both his extreme egoism and his celebrated charm. It was by a stroke of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... overlords that broke out in 1916, and which was a significant help to the Entente powers in their war against the Turks’ ally, Germany. But helping the Allies hadn’t been his main aim. What he had wanted was for the Arabs to take the opportunity of the war to seize power for themselves, in a great pan-Arab federation if ...”

“... wars with very large numbers of fatalities. But they inspire much less interest than Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine or Israel’s attack on Gaza. The war in Syria received years of diligent consideration, if only because the principal crimes were carried out by designated enemies of the US and UK. On the few ...”

“... Before​ the First World War, the European high aristocracy roamed freely across the continent, taking the waters at Baden-Baden, sampling the sea air at Biarritz, shooting partridge and pheasant at Sandringham, and coming together for grand balls and funerals in virtually every European capital. With so many occasions on which to meet, and so much disdain for those who married below their station, it was hardly surprising that the rate of intermarriage between Europe’s leading families was so high ...”