“... operations of the East India Company and, less directly, about the economic assumptions of middle-class life in the opening years of the 19th century. Oblivious of new-historical talk about the interaction of literature with other ‘signifying practices’, Hayter does not treat the sinking of the Abergavenny as a marginal anecdote that can be made to ...”

“... been present in ‘the domain of regular government’ since the defeat of the South in the Civil War. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was the first film screened at the White House, during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (Wilson was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan). The Southern ‘Dixiecrats’ had a seat at the table in FDR’s administration, allowing ...”

“... But Brexit is not the only factor. Ironically, the increasing diversity of the British political class has presented people with an expanded range of targets for their anger. After decades in which Parliament was overwhelmingly a boys’ club, a record number of MPs are women – 211 in the outgoing parliament. Women politicians, especially younger ...”

“... in his reflections on the success of pro-Franco propaganda in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. ‘I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that ...”

“... takes to be the result of the incestuous intermarriages of a small community. The Parsi boys in my class had legendary Persian names like Jehangir and Kaikobad and Khusro. Their surnames, however, can be faintly ridiculous in their eloquence, like ‘Sodabottleopenerwalla’. A Parsi writer I have read from boyhood onward is Busybee, the columnist. His real ...”

“... have often been as important as the boundary between England and Scotland, or Wales and England. Class alignments and levels of urbanisation complicate this north-south divide, but it remains significant in terms of income, longevity, diet, cultural behaviour, politics and much more, and it has been persistent. In the late 15th century, English monarchs felt ...”

“... businessman, who had found me when I was standing up by a window outside my compartment. A fourth-class compartment. The seats made of wood. It was the class called ‘travelling hard’. ‘Ah,’ said the irontongued German, speaking French for no particular reason except perhaps for its relation to Feydeau, ‘vous aurez ...”

“... classes sometimes behave in pretty mechanistic fashion, and his individual actors carry class labels tacked on to their names, reminding us of their ineluctable destinies), but at least we know where we stand. There is no flummery or mystification. Four basic propositions are stated concerning the Revolution. First, strong currents of popular ...”

“... and that the intruders show their contempt for their victims by defecating in their living-rooms. Class elements are present in the reporting of crimes of passion, which the elite naturally associate with slum-dwellers and squatters: the second type of crime involves something approaching class warfare. But the dominant ...”

“... The ‘law of war’ is a paradox, an exercise by turns noble and futile. ‘A remedy must be found,’ Grotius wrote, ‘for those who believe that in war nothing is lawful, and for those for whom all things in war are lawful.’ Geoffrey Best, in his magnificent exposition of the modern pursuit of legal restraint on warfare, opens with another aphorism, from Hersch Lauterpacht: ‘If international law is, in some ways’ at the vanishing-point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing-point of international law ...”

“... that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to reality-status might be found off-puttingly vehement. Still, her book, risking as it does a limiting categorisation and, inescapably, a caricaturing treatment of its subject, is the only one of the five which, making a serious ...”

“... to suffer, to fear that they might think him common, or, nastiest of all their put-downs, middle-class. Betjeman was undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of self-contempt. That this portrait of him should be so enormously detailed testifies to the author’s ...”

“... was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic emancipation, thinking it wrong that a religious minority should have all the power in Ireland. Yet he was responsible for a political act he came to regret – the so-called Gregory Clause, an amendment inserted in a Poor Law Bill ...”

“... will cut much ice with the sleuths. As trained journalists they will interpret the affair in class terms. For was not the upper middle class in England before the war itself much like a spy network, a nest of Freemasons whose emblem was not an apron but the old school tie, quick to ...”

“... to kill my child, and I’d fight like the devil. But if I had been called up to fight the Lebanon war of ’82 I’d not go. I’d go to jail,’ said Amos Oz, his voice gathering strength as he spoke. At a different point in our conversation he said: ‘If I thought Israel went wrong to the point of no return, I’d leave, but I’d still be Israeli. It ...”