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“... high-earning affluent manual worker remains working class while the own-account manual worker, who may earn a good deal less, is placed within the petty bourgeoisie. The working class, so redefined, is found to have declined from 47 per cent of the electorate in 1964 to 34 per cent in 1983. The big growth was in the routine non-manual or white-collar labour ...”

“... out his vulgar error in asking for a ‘drink’, instead of ‘something to drink’, which may well have stimulated Nancy Mitford to write her essay on Hare.) Sir Osbert Sitwell has testified to the mild panic which met Hare’s arrival at a garden party at Renishaw, when ‘the ladies held their hats to their heads and fled, fearing that he might ...”

“... from St Teresa: ‘More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ What this may foretell – other than, perhaps, that couplings will end in comeuppances – we cannot readily judge, because what Capote has left us is only a sample, in three chapters, of a novel begun more than two decades ago, published in piecemeal extracts, and never ...”

“... came into existence less than eighty years ago. With the tumult of Brighton scarcely over, it may seem unfair to ask if it is still, and can continue to be, a mass party. A party, that is, which has a large and enthusiastic membership of individuals, agreed on the road they are taking even if they differ about the speed of the journey; a party with an ...”

“... hold the audience’s interest better than most works one-third the size. The general reader may occasionally be bewildered by the mass of detail, yet cannot fail to enjoy a book whose publishers have priced it so firmly out of his reach. The high price is offset by some of the worst proof-reading and copy-editing with which the Clarendon Press has to ...”

“... brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do so. C. P. Snow, however, knew that Philip would write this book ‘and welcomed it; his only stipulation was that it should not be published in his lifetime.’ There was ten years’ difference between the two ...”

“... and Salzburgs, Adshead suggests that regions as large and far apart as Gallia and Galicia may also derive their names from salt deposits. ‘Aryan’ tongues spread over Iran and northern India as well, but did not carry with them the same root-word for salt. It may be conjectured that this root was taken over in ...”

“... On the night of 10 May 1996, 19 climbers were stranded in a blinding storm on the upper flanks of Mount Everest. The temperature dropped to −100° Fahrenheit. Whipped up by fierce winds, spindrift blasted the mountainside on which envelopes of thick cloud had descended. Visibility was reduced to a few feet. The following day, eight climbers were dead ...”

“... can imagine the tale packaged as a Coen brothers movie or a podcast by the makers of S-Town. It may seem partly to be a story about race, but it doesn’t fall easily into any of the standard narratives: if anything, it goes out of its way to confound them. Its twisted moral structure inverts the usual courtroom sympathies, making the reader hope for a ...”

“... simultaneously infect a single cell. It has even been suggested that new coronavirus strains may have arisen by incorporating RNA from their animal hosts or from other RNA viruses such as influenza. High levels of recombination and mutation are both good news and bad. They help the virus to evolve fast. Pessimists say, therefore, that Sars could rapidly ...”

“... Deveare Smith, and added to the reading lists of many courses in African-American literature. In May 2003, Gates donated the manuscript, now valued at $350,000 – he bought it for $8500 – to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1973. There was just one problem. Although experts authenticated the manuscript as having been written between 1853 and ...”

“... who died on the mountain in 1924, close to the summit, which he and his companion, Andrew Irvine, may or may not have reached. Since then there has been an unseemly rush to cash in on the discovery with at least six books, a poor film made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the ...”

“... to diminish their occurrence (the accounts always preach to the converted and incite the rest); we may be better placed now than ever before to wonder whether there’s any useful instruction to be had from such books. Whether, that is to say, they haven’t become the fiction of choice for contemporary armchair philosophers, telling us very little about ...”

“... it represents. Of the three, the map might appear to be the odd one out: the mirror and the photo may be two-dimensional illusions of a three-dimensional reality, and both are notoriously prone to distortion, but they operate by optical mechanisms that apparently guarantee a slavish fidelity to what can be seen. The map, in contrast, must ...”

“... you must consider that all these things come straight from the Kimes family archive. And so may anything else. Somewhere in Las Vegas, there may actually be a car salesman who was once a ventriloquist. His dummy may really be called Joe McCarthy, and he ...”