“... double, while landlords had a tougher time raising rents or ejecting tenants. The onset of war in 1939 further intensified the desire to keep workers happy. In October 1940, the state stopped taxing overtime pay, and the following year it enrolled all retirees in a national health insurance scheme, freeing them from reliance on the churches or public ...”

“... of the population. The number of full-time servicemen and women has halved since the Falklands War in 1982, and has been falling steadily for much longer. Yet the status of the armed forces in wider society has risen sharply, to a level that can feel uncomfortable to anyone with reservations about military violence. The annual pressure on public figures to ...”

“... His initial enthusiasm waned, but he remained a party member until 1945 and after the Second World War was judged to be a Nazi sympathiser and banned from teaching. Although he was partially rehabilitated in 1951, subsequent scholarship has uncovered nothing that puts the basic facts in a more favourable light, and has served chiefly to highlight the ...”

“... But as Tobias Wolff cautioned in his mordant memoir of military service during the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh’s Army: ‘Isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of ...”

“... population until at least the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research ...”

“... most of it comes as less than a revelation. The book is an autobiography of Seabrook’s working-class childhood in Northampton during and just after the war. He was a twin, and the two boys were brought up by their mother, surrounded by aunts. His father, a feckless, flamboyant man, took off while they were still ...”

“... invest less in education, and therefore produce fewer skilled workers. Another is that the middle class spends less when its income stagnates. As a recent report by the International Labour Organisation put it, growth tends to be ‘wage-led’, not ‘profit-led’, in most major economies. Whether or not these studies prove that there is a link between ...”

“... was often difficult for people to hear what they were saying.’ But the IRA’s ‘long war’ from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s was, it transpires, far from inevitable. Indeed, in Ó Dochartaigh’s dauntingly revisionist interpretation of the Troubles, the continuing conflict becomes far less easy to explain than the much desired peace that ...”

“... suspect, produced by the police detective who was watching him in 1869. (In fact, he was working-class, and 24 years old.) Somewhat later, after seven years’ penal servitude, he was seen by the Irish Parliamentarian F.H.O’Donnell as ‘a tall dark romantic looking man ... more like a starved poet than a revolutionist’. (Davitt in return called ...”

“... sometimes uses modern language for what had happened to his people: ‘we had sunk into another class ... We were members of the proletariat, though at that time we had never heard the name.’ Although Ian Jack was born into the proletariat and most of his elders worked in the linen mills, he is reluctant in a very Eighties way to accept the label ...”

“... to analyse the figures according to a particular categorisation of English social classes. This class-scheme was to prove momentous beyond anything he could have foreseen; at the time, its relation to fertility was simply a very pleasing confirmation (almost ironically complete, in fact) of what he already believed about the nation’s ...”

“... it looks back with a fierce, despairing, nostalgia. Is there a more solipsistic cry from the post-war years – when the world has become better informed than ever about mass starvation, tyranny, injustice, plague and poverty – than Jimmy Porter’s ‘There aren’t any good, brave causes left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the ...”

“... is what seems an interesting slip early in A.S. Byatt’s new novel. It is 1895. A young working-class man, Philip Warren, has been adopted by a liberal upper-class family, the Wellwoods. At the Kentish country home of Olive and Humphry Wellwood, a glorious Midsummer Party is in preparation. Humphry is a banker (though he ...”

“... their frustrations, remained Home Rulers from the 1870s until the outbreak of the First World War; but once war began, with the struggle of 1912-14 still having produced no parliament in Dublin, other, quite different forces gained ascendancy and the demand for Home Rule was soon replaced by republican separatism. Too ...”

“... short of the ceiling.) Others were preoccupied with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to younger ...”