“... 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 ...”

“... and that is not very much made up either. Then shouldn’t this be as impressive in its own way as War and Peace or that Anglo-Saxon chronicle so much beloved by Russians, The Forsyte Saga? Alas, no. Art does not work like that, even with a writer as talented, industrious and conscientious as Paul Scott. Art abhors a vacuum, and Scott’s sequence seems to be ...”

“... one and the chapter on the miners – are not biographical in emphasis at all?). The Second World War is often credited with generating the post-war Butskellite consensus, but Morgan argues here that the war’s role was to provide an opening for people who had developed their consensual ...”

“... of it, but he seemed to have some sort of Anglo-Irish background. Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was ...”

“... comfortingly like the past. Amusingly, David Cameron is often described as being ‘upper-middle-class’, but the originary arithmetic doesn’t lie. His father went to Eton, as did his grandfather. And on his mother’s perhaps fancier side, his grandfather went to Eton, and his great-grandfather also went there, and his great-great-grandfather, and ...”

“... genteel tradition: ‘Edith Wharton’s great subject should have been the biography of her own class, for her education and training had given her alone in her literary generation the best access to it. But the very significance of that education was her inability to transcend and use it.’ Dreiser escaped his limitations, used them in fact as his ...”

“... good available solutions. In trying to confront these two insurmountable problems, the governing class tied itself so repeatedly and inextricably in knots as to consign itself to the contempt of future generations.Foreign policy hasn’t often dominated British politics. It did, however, in the years after 1935, when the question arose as to how Britain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”