“... slim volume was a light-hearted check-list of the attributes of the North American upper middle class, so light-hearted it gave the impression it did not have a heart at all. The entire tone was most carefully judged: a mixture of contempt for and condescension towards the objects of its scrutiny, a tone which contrived to reassure the socially aspiring ...”

“... system, which benefited a few for so long’, implicating the country’s entire political class and every government it has had since the 1990s. Not so long ago, Lebanon’s banking sector was praised for performing an ‘economic miracle’. In 2009, Riad Salamé, governor of the Banque du Liban, was voted central banker of the year. Against the ...”

“... bread was, of course, Victorian liberalism’s rallying cry, the slogan under which new working-class voters were taught the gospel of free trade. Workers had good reason to care about prices, because bread provided around half the calories in working-class diets. Nothing was more essential to family life. Most of it, by ...”

“... to patients before the discovery and development of the main anti-tuberculosis drugs after World War Two – streptomycin, rifampicin and isoniazid – was, on balance, harmful. The best that sanatoria such as Nordrach in the Black Forest and its British imitators, Nordrach-on-Mendip in Somerset and Nordrach-on-Dee in Aberdeenshire, did was to prevent their ...”

“... graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common. No, what’s odd about ...”

“... As in Germany, Italy and France, the crisis began to make itself felt before the First World War. As in Germany, Italy and France, it was caused by the rise of an aggressive and self-confident working class, whose demands could not be satisfied within the terms of the old, 19th-century polity. In contrast to those of ...”

“... of my own experience; I was thus inoculated against the conventional economic wisdom of post-war Britain.’ There is little reason to doubt this, or a related comment on Keynesianism; ‘Before I ever read a page of Milton Friedman or Alan Walters, I just knew that these assertions could not be true.’ She readily makes the link from economics to ...”

“... wanted but seldom got – it is clear that Lennon and the Beatles transformed the face of post-war popular music, establishing a new sort of audience, pioneering the stereo LP as a new form, and introducing avant-garde material into the mainstream of what had been a limited and conservative genre. If Lennon had done nothing after Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely ...”

“... Major’s words, ‘completed its journey from backroom tavern to sumptuous palace, from working class to middle class, from foundry, pit and dock to drawing room, salon and theatre’. Not many former Tory leaders can produce chunks of sociology like that. Margaret Thatcher might have found it politically unsound. There ...”

“... by epidemics, wars of pacification, forced labour, increased taxes and rent, conscription for war service and a sharp drop in population as well as by higher incomes for some, more consumer goods and the introduction of schools and hospitals.’ Nabudere supplies a wonderfully revealing 19th-century quotation to show British church and business interests ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1992, I took a ‘luxury cab’ from Damascus to Amman. The cab’s class was important: luxury cabs provided extra services at the border crossing, helping to circumvent the humiliations reserved for Syrian men every time they left the country. When we reached the Syrian border, the driver got out and promised to get my documents stamped in five minutes ...”

“... the bureaucrat’s recording instinct of a Pepys. Only once, during the dark years of the Great War, did he turn the scrutiny of his art, like Virginia Woolf, upon himself. In January 1917 he started a detailed journal of his life at Ayot St Lawrence with his wife Charlotte. On 9 January he had to record a difference between them. He tried to amuse ...”

“... and on the wrong side of the counter. The portrayal of the department store as a hotbed of sex and class-consciousness anticipates the English Edwardian novelists, but this is also a study in the pathology of obsessive love, a love which is a kind of enslavement and forces the sufferer to react in entirely predictable ways. Wokulski, an intelligent and ...”

“... long interval he became an assiduous and effective reviewer of other people’s novels. Then the war uncorked him, spilling out the fantasy of recall that became the Eustace and Hilda trilogy. Simonetta Perkins takes place in Venice, the city that Hartley fell in love with and, during the Thirties, lived in for months at a time. A well brought up young ...”

“... come into the story at all. They drank a lot, as did many Southern gentlemen after the Civil War. It isn’t difficult to connect drink with defeat, but James Fox thinks that the cult of the belle also was the result of defeat: ‘The belles became the pure white maidens of Provençal romance, antidotes to the surrounding blackness, whose honour ...”