“... the modest but watchful Connor household would be visited by Uncle Bob, a former miner who had risen to become a high-up sort of civil servant, an OBE, no less. The boy Karl observed with admiration Bob’s air of ‘frigid Olympian quiet’, ‘the awe’ of his ‘presence’. His visits ‘disclosed a high grand somewhere else, where human beings were ...”

“... serving as fancy dress; a razor slipping and a GI getting castrated at a drunken homosexual orgy; James Dean being roped in for a one-night stand; Zsa Zsa Gabor getting her famous black eye from Hutton-fancier Rubirosa (after whose magnificent appendage smart restaurants named their giant pepper mills). Curiously blind to her family firm’s ...”

“... Burgess whined about his own prices. If he had done the sums he would have learnt they have only risen with inflation. He should think, not how much, they cost, but how much they are worth. £ 13.95 I think it was. I haven’t had time to write about living in an unlicensed squat with my middle son James – and being ...”

“... field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically selective (as well as ...”

“... that read ‘No Irish Need Apply,’ and claimed that through hard work and gumption they had risen above oppression while blacks continued to wallow in self-pity. Boston’s Irish were not alone in their resentments. Martin Luther King was pelted with bricks when he led marches in Chicago’s Polish and Lithuanian enclaves during the summer of ...”

“... diversion. It was at the centre of our family circle every day when my father read the King James Bible and prayed. This might sound like the 1670s, not the 1970s, but it was on a footstool at the hearth that I learned to recite the Shorter Catechism. I knew the sight and sound of burning coal so intimately – the way it cracked and split, the way a ...”

“... of stabbings and no-go zones.It is true that ‘knife crime’ – a synthetic category – has risen steadily in recent years, as has Londoners’ fear of crime, though the increase began around the midpoint of Boris Johnson’s second term as mayor. Police data on knife crime with injury suggests a downward trend since 2017 but, that said, few doubt the ...”

“... afraid I still haven’t got the point. It’s the same stance, except that this time the hand has risen above his head. It hovers about two metres above the level of the road; it comes three-quarters of the way up the casement of the pub window. I got the point. If you’d tried to stand where Pavey was standing on Monday, 23 July 2007 – the day water ...”

“... Nevis wrong, and boosted it by a metre).The bolt sits on a bed of granite, but mean sea level has risen since 1921. One of the reasons, for the southern English landmass – including Lincolnshire – is that we’re still recovering from the last ice age. The pop fact that southern England is sinking, and northern England and Scotland rising, makes it sound ...”

“... rivals for the leadership were unable or unwilling to do the same was their fault, not his.Having risen to the top of the Labour Party largely by being himself, Corbyn perhaps saw little reason to change. Sympathetic commentators in the early period used to cite a new, more consensual style of leadership, but what they were describing was a hope rather than a ...”

“... a better novelist than herself, and expressed a fear that she might ‘turn into a writer like James Joyce’; there was little danger. In the flurry of chatter and prophecy that preceded the publication of Daphne du Maurier the main emphasis was on the novelist’s homosexuality. Chatto’s handout spoke delicately of ‘her highly significant friendship ...”

“... 10 per cent of married women were recorded as working outside the home, by 1981 the figure had risen to 47 per cent. Historians of the second half of the 20th century will not make the mistake committed by students of 19th-century standards of living, of overlooking the crucial contribution of women both outside and inside the home. The most important ...”

“... disastrous voyage of the Bachelor from Caithness in 1773, and the motives of its chief organiser, James Hogg, a Lothian man. Hogg, already a migrant, had tried to farm in Caithness, and had failed to adjust to the local society, still under the domination of the surname system, and also inclined to traditional forms of thievery from strangers. The families ...”

“... meaning than its most correct expression. Banks came from a Lincolnshire landowning family who had risen in a few generations from obscurity to wealth. He was sent to Harrow at nine years of age. He learned little and was transferred to Eton at 13. Liveliness, energy and good spirits were always more evident than scholarship, but it was at Eton that he ...”

“... of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among others, and isn’t ...”