“... as a fable of how the militantly anti-bourgeois frequently turn out to have been solidly middle-class all along. Spiotta herself was born in 1966. She published her first novel, Lightning Field (LA, hyperconsumerism, anomic drift) in 2001, and together with her husband now owns and works in a restaurant in upstate New York. She has said that it was hearing ...”

“... wish to become a meteorologist was now overwhelmed by the urge to write poetry. In ‘To World War Two’, written half a century later, Koch recalls thinking: ‘If I’m killed while thinking of these lines, it will be too corny When it’s reported’ (I imagined that it would be reported!) So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on ...”

“... idea of the Thirties, the afternoon men in their Soho clubs and hideouts, their lust for working-class boys, their not wonderfully well-informed Marxism, and their easy way of arranging matters to suit themselves, whether in the choice of wartime careers, say at Bletchley, or perhaps in some other establishment where scraps of secret could be salvaged to ...”

“... could be purchased more and more readily by more and more persons possessing money rather than class, the nobility could not uphold their image. Ceremonial and hierarchical display of gold brocade and velvet came to be seen as meretricious: the clothing of upstarts. ‘Luxury’ has always been a hot political issue; for Kuchta, the language of clothes is ...”

“... Williams was, indeed, a quite compulsive writer, almost a chronic writer. As a young working-class scholarship boy up at Cambridge, he seems to have decided, like not a few Welshmen before and after him, that the way to storm this alien citadel was to overwhelm it with a tide of wordy socialism. As an undergraduate Communist, he wrote his first pamphlet ...”

“... Harrison’s ‘barbarian’ recital of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a Northern working-class accent that he called a halt after only four words:‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death …Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of thoseShakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!’As a plebeian scholarship boy at Leeds Grammar ...”

“... characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes. Williams also noted the importance of the Imperial bureaucracy in this ...”

“... be ever more historical.’ That was prescient: the 19th-century Weimar court and educated middle class devoted much energy to memorialising the town’s cultural heroes in museums, statues, and in Goethe’s case, the great Weimar Edition. Weimar was not alone in its myth-making, in the way it turned itself into a kind of museum during the historicising 19th ...”

“... with teachers. Slaughterhouse-Five, about the Allied bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, was a perfect book for impressionable readers ready to graduate from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: it was serious yet comic, historical yet quasi-science-fictional, complex in structure but straightforward in style. You could read it in a flash and ...”

“... Isaac Babel was a middle-class Jew from Odessa who rode to war with a Cossack regiment. This extraordinary conjunction occurred during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. It is not news, because the single work that made Babel a famous writer – the short story collection Red Cavalry – is based on his experiences that summer, when he turned 26, at the First Cavalry Army HQ in a Volhynian village ...”

“... The post-war saloon-bar modernisation programme began in the era of Macmillan and the Affluent Society. Like most such programmes in England, its main intention was to resist the modern: the character of a pub, or so the landlord would tirelessly reassure his regulars, was not going to be changed, just ‘brought out’, much as monosodium glutamate brings out the true flavour of food ...”

“... but Lolly Willowes, which got her off to such a good start, is about a downtrodden middle-class woman who escapes her male oppressors and becomes a witch. This reminds one of Keith Thomas’s observation that medieval women, if they wanted a hearing, had to become prophets (‘the best hope of gaining an ear for female utterances was to represent them ...”

“... and unappreciated in the London literary world when he first tried to set up as a writer after the war. The truth, as it turns out, is that by the 1950s Green was in his way as much of an outsider as Dahl. His literary friends and fans, too, were un-English – the Americans Eudora Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty ...”

“... in history as a perverse preoccupation with the mistakes of the past. History was for second-class minds; first-class minds could safely ignore it and get on with the job in hand. Such an attitude, however, could only survive so long as there existed a rough consensus as to what the job in hand was. In the Fifties, the ...”

“... socialists, in fact, they are wondering how to tackle the ‘post-ist’ age – post-Cold war, post-socialist, post-Keynesian, post-feminist, Post-Modernist. Besides, any attempt to recruit God on behalf of New Labour would encounter the opposition of those with Christian backgrounds who remain uncertain of New Labour’s merits, such as Michael ...”