“... democracy was undone by its victory in the Sixties and Seventies. As the solid blue-collar working class fragmented and an employee class emerged, the old class conflict turned into a fight for social mobility. People rejected the bureaucracy that managed the economy and the trade unions ...”

“... said something as we passed. He frowned and shook his head. He looked afraid.’ He knew his upper-class types, and his dons and schoolmasters. As the son of an archbishop he knew the clergy all too well. On Dean Farrar: ‘I have no doubt he thinks of himself as the ascetic dean, quivering with indignation at the immoralities of the age ... moving to his ...”

“... strange desert country named after its dynasty and ruled almost entirely by a quite numerous upper class wholly generated from the loins of its founding father, King Abdul Aziz, better known in the West as Ibn Saud. Saudi Arabia was said in the Senate to be ‘scorning basic American interests’, which meant both human rights and Israel. Americans then and ...”

“... had time and means to ‘find himself’, mixing with the bright and powerful, belonging to a class which gave him some measure of sexual society that he would have been unlikely to find as the son of a labourer. Also White was fortunate to come of age during a war which did more to educate and liberate him than cause ...”

“... Aslam’s fourth novel, and his most ambitious, seeks to describe both the communal nature of war – the bereavements and partings that afflict almost everyone – and the particular experiences of a few individuals in a Pakistani town called Heer. It may take a while to adjust to Aslam’s cast of characters and his premodernist fusion of the individual ...”

“... Though he joined in the chorus of contempt and hatred which it was fashionable for the middle-class English literati of the time to feel for their schooldays, the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years ...”

“... itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The scepticism about arms and armies that informed the original Wilsonian vision, indeed, that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became ...”

“... year – a revenge, at least in part, on the Victorian values which he blamed for an agonising war. In all this, the Liberals were avenging themselves on the Right, and Strachey’s assaults probably helped to mould, and were certainly reinforced by, Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. Bertrand Russell read Eminent Victorians ...”

“... delayed adolescence of a generation whose teenage years had been overshadowed by the First World War. ‘We strain every nerve to keep young,’ Nicky says. ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ his fiancée replies. ‘It probably only means we shan’t live so long.’ The dialogue sets the underlying terrors bouncing off a ...”

“... upbringing – Eton and Balliol – lightly but not altogether unselfconsciously. In World War Two a contemporary remembered Major Grimond, now a veteran of the Normandy campaign, ‘surrounded by people completely unlike himself so that he seemed a different animal, a noble beast in a farmyard’. He later corrected a television interviewer who called ...”

“... as a contributor to New Republic, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, through the Gulf War: from Baghdad to Amman; on to Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Saudi Arabia; into Kuwait and back into Iraq, via Basra; thence to Kurdistan. There are few sops to terrible beauty, whatever Kelly’s dust-jacket champions may say, and no excessive enthusiasm for the ...”

“... him writing in the summer of 1952: ‘We are drifting into the worst economic crisis since the war and nobody really pretends that nationalisation or denationalisation are any help whatsoever in such a situation.’ He was acutely aware that there were no simple answers here, least of all for the Left. After the 1955 General Election he wrote of the Labour ...”

“... in New Delhi in memory of Indira Gandhi. A little group of us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ...”

“... agreed to receive a deputation from her East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), the working-class women’s organisation that had broken away (or been cut off) from the militant mothership controlled by Emmeline, Pankhurst’s mother, and her sister Christabel. ‘I feel it is my duty to take this course,’ Pankhurst informed Asquith, ‘and I shall ...”

“... of the pluralist nature of the Party. Clement Attlee was a Fabian socialist from a middle-class background; Ernest Bevin, born into poverty in rural Somerset, had created the Transport and General Workers Union; and Herbert Morrison, the shop assistant straight out of Mr Polly, had risen to influence through local government in London, including the ...”