“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the political norm in Turkey. A more structural explanation is needed. During the Second World War, Inönü had steered his country in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering political affinity and passive assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be ...”

“... so FHB tonight.’ I liked that it was code, that it was our code. It sounded like an upper-class game, it had the well-worn confidence of fancy children’s literature. And I loved when Mother whispered the secret to me later, at some critical moment during the party: ‘Remember, go easy – FHB on the casserole.’ I sometimes use it with my own ...”

“... Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con ...”

“... in property, but he also ran for Parliament in order to avoid being called up during the war, which he spent as a spiv, selling chocolate, benzedrine, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens on the black market. Eventually, he was briefly and ingloriously conscripted. Afterwards, he styled himself Colonel Cornwell, but would pretend to be embarrassed by ...”

“... is why the North fell so much further than was necessary. In the aftermath of the First World War, the economies of the South-East and the North were ‘roughly on level pegging’, contributing 35 and 30 per cent of GDP respectively; by the end of the 20th century, the figures were 40 and 21 per cent, with London gaining another 5 percentage points ...”

“... commercial, ugly harbingers of an ugly future. He detected their handiwork in every war and panic, and studied them as barometers of social disintegration. Observing the Jews and the Moors in Spain gave him, he quipped, a more liberal view of the Inquisition. The presence of 450,000 Jews in New York City alone, ‘doing Kosher’, proved to him ...”

“... when considered historically. It traditionally refers to the ownership of capital by a restricted class of entrepreneurs. What does the capitalist Britain of the second railway boom, where the ownership of wealth was concentrated entirely in the hands of individuals, have in common with a modern Britain where, despite Mrs Thatcher’s best efforts at ...”

“... Romans ever did,’ writes Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘instead of trying to see how the Roman ruling class built the system of their own government to ensure order in the State and continuity to their own rule.’ Mommsen’s influence lasted long, particularly in England, where the ‘Whig’ approach to modern history had its counterpart in the study of ...”

“... records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170 million under ‘war’. All governments have tried to encourage or discourage procreation and passed laws about human coupling and decoupling. All the global religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism) and all the 20th-century ideologies have strong convictions on these ...”