“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for quality, which translated into a national market: to keep above the sea of the middle class, ‘you’ had to shop at Saks or Brooks and had to stay up with cultural affairs through the New Yorker. This bit of distinction was the commodity on sale, and it sold well to affluent suburbanites from Syracuse to Seattle whose coffee-tables the magazine ...”

“... encourage one to think of it as grounded in the delineation, and in the perceptions, of a social class. No such grounding, no such principle of invisibility, can be found in Dickens. I am assuming that it may be all right to talk of classes with reference to the work of writers who did not themselves do so. Backward-ranging comparisons, and a risk of ...”

“... of the heart, as it constantly reared up and hit a beautiful girl, a beautiful woman of a certain class with certain expectations of what that life ought to offer, not even to some such woman so placed, but essentially to her, this singular creature, weak, unsure, feminine. What she has explored throughout her career has been, almost uniquely, herself and her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... government’ in 2021 as ‘good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from war and crime’. Concern for individual lives? ‘We may have the best that is possible in the circumstances. There was wide support for setting up the Man Penal Settlement.’ But still he talks to the Council and the Warden, and is told by Xan that he desires ...”

“... who signed the ‘Next Five Years’ manifesto in 1935. As one contributor puts it, ‘in that pre-war world, such things could be done discreetly and unobtrusively; there was no need to indulge in ungentlemanly tactics or drum-beating ... the carefully hand-picked nature of the Working Membership precluded infiltration by ambitious and discordant ...”

“... legend of the Resistance had begun to corrode. Political rivalries and the paranoia of the Cold War alienated old comrades from one another. Heroic reputations were defaced as survivors wondered who might have betrayed whom in the fog of clandestinity. Agonising research confronted the French with the sheer scale of civil service and police collaboration ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Britain was also constricting, especially if you were a radical left-wing journalist with an upper-class accent and a taste for good port. You could always affect a proletarian accent and stop drinking port, but Hitchens, to his credit, did neither. He used, at Oxford, to do all the right things with the comrades of Balliol Junior Common Room and then slope ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has nothing going for it. I begin in this way because Virginia Woolf calls Three Guineas, her anti-war book, an ‘enquiry into the nature of fear’. Three Guineas finds a kinship among fear’s victims, a move which many readers thought wrong-headed or downright foolish when the book was published in 1938, and which is still hard to take. Woolf argues that ...”

“... Right’s preoccupation with economic growth and the political Left’s insistence on the working-class share of this growth. Is there a ladder of green awareness? Do we move on from supporting the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, or the Society for the Protection of Rural England, to an understanding of the broader concerns these particular ...”