“... names in the ABC of British Warships with purloined dockyard pencils stamped with the words War Department and the Crown. These were the ships I had seen from our front window – the destroyers Daring and Diamond, the aircraft-carrier Eagle, the cruiser Gambia, the triple-funnelled minelayer Apollo – as they travelled upriver on their way to their ...”

“... vulnerable brother. Robert had been the scientific director of the Manhattan Project during the war and was then occupied with the poisonous politics of America’s postwar nuclear weapons development – politics which brought him down five years later. Robert knew that Frank had lied. Shortly after Frank and his wife joined the Party in 1937, he had told ...”

“... funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ...”

“... Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion. He is introduced to us, not just as a bicycle buff, but as ‘a classical musician and aspiring Argentine tango dancer’, and should therefore ...”

“... declining Mirror could be saved only if it was turned into a lively, iconoclastic, working-class paper. With the help of a new editor Bartholomew started the transformation in 1933, using the New York Daily News as a model. Bill Connor, who would become the columnist ‘Cassandra’, was recruited from J. Walter Thompson, where he had been a ...”

“... house weekend, rather than in a glorified warehouse at a posh version of Flog It! With upper-class insouciance the diamond brooches were shown alongside the cups and saucers, the well-worn chintz, table lamps and signed copies of the works of Alan Titchmarsh. Anyone hoping for crumbs from the great collections at Chatsworth was disappointed. This was the ...”

“... the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph sets out, if not to rescue that persecuted class (of which he is ‘in part’ a member) from extinction, then at least ‘to engender a change’ in ‘the present climate’ of anti-toff feeling. His argument, broadly, is that the aristocratic tradition in Britain has been predominantly one of public ...”

“... Some see the claim as further proof of the stultifying grip of a long-established class formation on so many areas of national life, while others delight in the easily comprehensible fretwork of family trees in a Downton Abbey version of intellectual history.Perhaps the most influential elaboration of the allegedly distinctive kinship pattern ...”

“... affected were said in the past to have been ‘touched with fire’ (the American Civil War), suffering from ‘shell-shock’ (World War One) or afflicted by ‘traumatic neurosis’ (World War Two). In each instance the symptoms that patients displayed seemed to split along ...”

“... about the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No ...”

“... in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause. Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative ...”

“... air and knew or suspected the truth: here was a man locked in combat over the future of a working-class party who was born to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an ...”

“... on this scale against so much competition cannot be attributed merely to the preference of middle-class parents for books about genteel children. As Brogan reminds us, Ransome could write with real sympathy about lower-class children and adults, and his middle-class ‘Swallows’ surely ...”

“... Daughter’, say, or The Marble Faun. Especially since the Second World War, most 20th-century commentators have preferred to echo Melville’s celebrated remarks on his contemporary’s ‘great power of blackness’. If we are to credit Dearest Beloved, T. Walter Herbert’s dramatic reinterpretation of life among the ...”

“... set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to describe his ‘lenient and humane’ treatment to the visiting actress, spat on her instead and was beaten almost into blindness; prisoners secretly gave her their social security numbers to prove their existence to the outside ...”