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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Hillary Clinton and her exceptionalist allies. For people like Max Boot and Robert Kagan, war is a desirable state of affairs, especially when viewed from the comfort of their keyboards, and the rest of the world – apart from a few bad guys – is filled with populations who want to build societies just like ours: pluralistic, democratic and open ...”

“... of slaves were required to bowl at the young sons of slaveowners, but the bowlers – the servant class – began to practise batting and got quite good at it. When formal organisation began, the structure of West Indian society – or of its various societies – was closely reproduced in the clubs and boards of control that ran cricket in the Caribbean, a ...”

“... Synge’s origin was solidly Anglo-Irish, Protestant, upper-middle class: his father a well-got barrister, his mother the daughter of a Protestant parson in Schull, County Cork. Presumably it was a financial blow when his father died, but Synge was too young to feel a difference, and besides there was enough money coming from rented estates in Wicklow ...”

“... Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on John Carswell’s ...”

“... his cronies with infusing British society with a tyrannical spirit. The government had declared war on its people, Knox claimed, and the front lines were everywhere: in newspapers, pulpits, taverns, the ‘sequestered walks of private life’. Coffee houses, famous for political gossip, were particularly suspect. In November 1792, John Frost, a leading ...”

“... by a different kind of machine, one which had served caste, kings and God for centuries. A lower-class clockmaker was at most upper-case Trade. Besides, Beaumarchais never showed the slightest interest in the mysteries of the Universe, nor did he worry much about God. He was far more interested in money, and in winning. He was given some schooling but at 13 ...”

“... In the years leading up to the American Revolution and well beyond the War of 1812 Americans living in the New York area made no secret of their allegiance to England. New York’s aristocratic sympathy – cultural, commercial and religious – was not shared in Massachusetts, the home of a growing Irish population and of the Boston Tea Party ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In July​ 1917, shortly after his arrival at Craiglockhart War Hospital for neurasthenic officers on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Wilfred Owen drafted the first of the five poems published during his lifetime. ‘Sing me at dawn,’ it exclaims,                             but only with your laugh:Like sprightly Spring that laugheth into leaf;Like Love, that cannot flute for smiling at Life ...”

“... point). It has no national dress, nor any evident national icons in the tartan/leeks/thistles class. St George’s Day attracts no celebrations. It does have a national flag, but not everyone knows what it is. A football commentator remarked that he was pleased to see ‘nearly as many’ St George’s Crosses being waved as Union Jacks, when England ...”