“... periods, give or take a year or two. The Twenties were self-contained as the era between the Great War and the world slump, and the Thirties a loaded pause between one catastrophe and the next. But the Seventies had no separate identity. Recognising this, Phillip Whitehead begins his book – written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with ...”

“... Ministry to release lower figures. A friend of mine, a normally pacific man living in a middle-class Sunni district in west Baghdad, rang me. ‘I am not leaving my home,’ he said. ‘The police commandos arrested 15 people from here last night including the local baker. I am sitting here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they come for ...”

“... part of American political culture from the outset. Taylor breaks decisively with a trope of Cold War propaganda which has worked its way into historical scholarship: the idea that unlike the ‘bad’ French and Russian Revolutions, which degenerated into violent class conflict, a united American people rebelled against ...”

“... by their common recall of Forster’s time in Alexandria, where he spent the First World War in a quasi-military capacity working for the Red Cross. Each records the surprising re-emergence of something long suppressed or forgotten – the reliving of intense emotions and ‘a timely reminder of another method’ of ordering such experience. It is ...”

“... on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since ...”

“... Sartre had a passive, self-centred war, well-suited to his deeply civilian temper, with no heroics and a great deal of free time. He was mobilised in September 1939, served in the East of France until he was captured in the collapse of June 1940, spent nine months as a prisoner of war, then sat out the Occupation in Paris ...”

“... and national feeling. The left-wing cultural, theatrical and sporting movements, the huge working-class participation in audiences and choirs and agit-prop, blinded revolutionary writers and artists to the growth of Hitlerism elsewhere, and to the danger of the divisions on the Left which allowed the Nazis finally to come to power. Willett’s conclusion ...”

“... subjects. Both groups studied were experiencing insecurity. The Scottish families were of landed class, made insecure by sudden changes in politics and in the control and policy of the Church; the English families a century later were of the emerging middle class, busy creating niches in the professions and in the world of ...”

“... who hoped to serve a proletarian revolution that would abolish their privilege and consume their class. In the received version of the ‘Thirties myth’, the middle-class writers who took up left-wing views succeeded only in deceiving themselves and betraying their gifts. In Kermode’s counter-myth, these writers braved ...”

“... Roughly twice a week several carloads of people set off from middle-class areas of central Damascus for a ‘party’ in the unlikely setting of Qudsaya, an impoverished hill town about eight miles northwest of the city. As the guests drive up the steep streets to the town’s small central square, young men, some with scarves wrapped round their faces, look out for signs of danger ...”

“... Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, has compiled a meticulous account of the politics of the civil war of 1990-94 and the genocide that followed. He recounts, day by day and sometimes hour by hour, what the main actors were doing. He describes a political class very similar to those found in other small nations. Some of its ...”

“... draw the demarcation-line between the aristocracy and the rest to take in almost the whole middle class except ‘the rag trade, showbiz and property dealing’. They contend (and under the guise of merely purveying scholarly information spiked with quaint anecdotes, this is quite a contentious book, almost a tract) that the term ‘middle ...”

“... when workers could afford to send their children to college and see them rise into the middle class. But from 1973 to 2015 – the era of globalisation, when many of those jobs vanished abroad – productivity rose 73.4 per cent while wages rose by only 11.1 per cent. Trump argued that this was caused by unrestricted illegal immigration and the ...”

“... 1983 is the most important election since the war,’ said my Italian friend, a sociologist, exultantly. ‘After nearly forty years everything is in flux.’ I had rung him the day after the election. He could hardly speak for excitement. The country was stunned. The results had completely flattened the opinion polls, which has been caught with their predictions down ...”

“... out whether any of us – too many for the available chairs – had registered and paid for the class.) Since the publication of The Limits to Capital in the second year of the Reagan administration and at the dawn of what has come to be known as the financialisation of the world economy, the dual movement of Harvey’s career has been to return time and ...”