“... concomitant economic growth that began in the mid-1970s encouraged the formation of a new middle class, which steadied the political pendulum by filling the gap between the warring left and right. Education rather than capital accumulation lifted people into the middle tiers of the social pyramid and, since the public sector is the main employer of the ...”

“... Sivanandan, began his essay ‘All That Melts into Air Is Solid’, published in 1990 in Race and Class, the institute’s house journal, ‘dedicated to those friends with whom, out of a different loyalty, I must now openly disagree.’* He was wrong, I think, to impute that Hall and his comrades were writing in bad faith, but otherwise, bang on then and ...”

“... cost. Rita Fitzgerald, scion of a Castle Catholic Dublin family in the years of the Irish war of independence, marries Frank O’Fiaich, Eamon de Valera’s right-hand man, and becomes embroiled in a plot to finance the Irish revolution with the Romanov crown jewels. (Like many a fabular event in Irish history, this one is conceivably true.) The ...”

“... led him to chronicle the mass of humankind, but rather what Harvey Kaye calls the ‘machinery of class domination’. In particular, he has explored the ideas and processes by which governing classes rule and are themselves regulated. Duelling, for him, represents ‘a burden imposed on itself by the élite as the gage of its right to be considered a higher ...”

“... Whitehouse wrote to one of her supporters. They knew what was good, based on a solid lower-middle-class education intent mostly on reproducing the status quo, and they trusted that what they had been told by teachers and preachers was true. Shakespeare was good, and so, someone must have said, was Strindberg. There was no need to mess with what was officially ...”

“... book which will appeal especially to those interested in the history and mythography of the Great War. When war broke out Haggard was in Canada as a member of the Dominions Royal Commission, inquiring into natural resources and trade. He decided to keep a diary of public events to help him write a history of the ...”

“... and of social hierarchy. For example, he also examines the impact of commercialism on working-class leisure activities – circuses, music-halls, sport – showing how it reconfigured but did not erode class distinctions. The chapter on ‘The Business of Culture’ takes an unsentimental look at literature, music and ...”

“... In Theory of War, Joan Brady reveals a little-known piece of American history that has dominated her own life. In the chaos after the Civil War, white children, the sons and daughters of impoverished widows, of ragged soldiers, were sold into virtual slavery. Black slaves – who had been expensive – had just been liberated ...”

“... married life had promised, and partly, Herzog suggests, because of the instinctive cupidity of her class, pursues him through the courts until he’s all but penniless. For all that Herzog accuses her of being out of touch with reality, her litigious skill far surpasses his. On the back flap of Michael Hofmann’s new edition, My First Wife is pitched as ‘a ...”

“... Administration, with an obligation to prevent political patronage – the curse of the Civil War pension scheme – as well as to protect the scheme’s financial viability and to propose improvements. The existence of the SSA has limited the erosion of public pensions in the United States; in Britain, there is no such independent body. Blackburn is ...”

“... of what she dimly recalled writing to her husband while he was at the Front in the First World War and was assembled from working-class epistolary Lego: ‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me’ etc.My grandfather committed suicide in 1957. A dour, uncommunicative man, reputedly with a violent temper in early life, his ...”

“... eloquence all the more arresting. Johnston’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbour he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he took up his post ...”

“... a growing realisation that partition is not the problem, but a symptom of the problem; that the war is not the British versus ‘the Northern Irish people’ (that convenient Noraid rationalisation), but one Northern Irish people against another; and that, looked at from Dublin, neither of these ‘Northern Irish peoples’ has much discernible affinity ...”

“... blows and hold things together – or rather, they are the most eminent of them, for had the class not been a relatively large one, the process of disintegration would certainly have been more rapid and more painful than it has been. Lord Redcliffe-Maud possesses, in an outstanding degree, the qualities necessary for success in this field and his success ...”

“... funny. Unlike the people who can’t glimpse a Nancy Mitford novel without moralising about class, jeunesses dorées and the demerits of froth, Nancy – who was nearly, non-U-ly, called Ruby, and whose family weren’t nearly as thick or rich as they’re supposed to have been – didn’t lecture, and didn’t much mind about anything. There were ...”