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“... they cannot be expected to scrutinise from day to day, are those of standardly-educated middle-class people with an interest in the arts. Shaw has no quarrel with them on this score, and spends quite a lot of time in this book defending establishment valuations. However, he also thinks that the best should be made available to sections of the population ...”

“... been able to find common ground in nostalgia for the solidarities of the old inner-city working-class community. The most grandiloquent expressions of this nostalgia have come from those identified with the Left: Jeremy Seabrook’s interpretation of looting as ‘the loss of morality in these poor, proud, stoical working communities’ (Guardian, 20 ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”

“... in social history as an impressive statistic: one family in 20 still lives in this kind of inter-war council housing. Homes fit for Heroes tells how they came to be built, and why they took the form they did, but Dr Swenarton also intends to ‘contribute to our understanding of design in general and especially of its relation to ideology and the ...”

“... relief for unemployed intellectuals’, and it was given to Orwell during the early war years when from August 1941 to November 1943 he was paid £650 a year as a talks producer in the Indian Section of the Far Eastern Service. He was hired as Eric Blair, but those who brought him in were clearly signing up George Orwell, author of Burmese ...”

“... house nearby and helped look after him as he grew old. The poet’s heroic period was in the Civil War, when he acted as welfare officer to the Union wounded, bringing them fruit and candy as Hemingway was to do to the Italian Army in 1916. Unlike Hemingway, he made no personal heroic myth out of it, though what he saw and helped do was probably more terrible ...”

“... heavy metal band Scorpions released ‘Wind of Change’, a song celebrating the end of the Cold War: ‘The future’s in the air/Can feel it everywhere.’ It also contained the hopeful lines: ‘Let your balalaika sing/What my guitar wants to say.’ It turns out, though, that they had it the wrong way round: it is Putin who calls the tune to which ...”

“... added a lack of martial spirit to the bill. For V.H. Galbraith, Richard was a ‘misfit in his own class’ with ‘nice personal habits’, a ‘non-co-operator, who hates rugger and cricket and refuses to shout on the touchline’. (Galbraith revealed something of his own background here: a public school boy, he had shown ‘impetuous courage’ in the First ...”

“... ways of thinking and behaving that have almost entirely disappeared, along with the social class that bred them in a certain city at a certain time. While the forces that shaped Johnson still flourish all around (and particularly above) us – floreat Etona and no mistake – the society in which Livingstone was reared is now dust and ashes. Almost ...”

“... the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned into a flood with the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War that followed. The Jewish population of Moscow, Russia’s new capital, grew by a factor of almost ten between 1912 and 1926, and continued to grow until by 1939 it had reached 250,000, making Jews the second largest ethnic group in the city. More than a ...”

“... sensible administration of business begin. The third is the dream of the politician who transcends class identity, moving away from defining origins not just to enjoy wider worlds but to take the wider view. This is also a dream about enlightenment, figured as the logic of a life story. Its hidden premise is the thought that those who most completely ...”

“... outright inconsistency. Consider all the classes that are not members of themselves, such as the class of dogs, which is not itself a dog, and try to combine them into a big class of their own, the class of classes that are not self-members: then you have the result that this ...”

“... a socialist, held out the hope of collective action against racism and inequality. Ellison, a Cold War liberal, wrote scathingly about white benefactors in Invisible Man but believed in the promise of a racially inclusive American democracy. Baldwin, the gay stepson of a preacher, dreamed that romantic love between a white man and a black man might give birth ...”

“... the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis ...”

“... well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and pastimes has a certain period interest. This is the beginning of the end of that culture mourned by Jeremy Seabrook among others:                                       A landlord stares.All he has ...”