“... of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the beginning of the First World War. Explorers of any age are likely to be enveloped in romantic haze, but during that period they seemed almost superhuman. Nineteenth-and early 20th-century exploration was a highly competitive and widely publicised enterprise: the search for the headwaters of ...”

“... a master of opposition tactics both inside and outside the House of Commons. Waging a spectacular war on two fronts, he attacked the Gladstone Government and his own Front Bench with equal vigour. His barnstorming tours of the country and constant manipulation of the press marked him out as a new species of demagogue appealing to the mass electorate created ...”

“... bolos, babas and piles of golden patisseries. This is like the jewelled prose of the upper-class English traveller, carried to the threshhold of burlesque – and maybe across it, to produce a variety of Camp. On the Black Hill has its feasts too: ‘There were rolls of spiced beef, a cold roast turkey, polonies, brawns, pork pies and three Wye ...”

“... stage further, by writing it in verse. Her detective heroine, Jill Fitzpatrick, is a gay, working-class former cop, who narrates in a hyperactive free-form skitter: Always this  I’ll ring you crap Sure, I say. Sure  because I don’t want to hassle sure  because she’s married sure  because something’s better than nothing Fitzpatrick’s lexicon is ...”

“... a strong feeling for Stephen Haggard’s novel Nya, which he happened to find a copy of during the war, and which he feels to be a forerunner of Lolita, giving sound professional reasons why Lolita won out and Nya vanished into limbo. What really matters, I suspect, is that Nya is for him something to hold onto, like the novels of Edward Upward, which he also ...”

“... His father was on the trams, but did rather better at illegal bookmaking. They were Irish, working-class, lapsed Catholics. Sidney left school at 14 and spent his late teens in irregular employment and part-time art education. He could not draw well enough for Mr Leyshon-White’s commercial art agency, so he ran the correspondence course. He enjoyed writing ...”

“... created a ‘libertarian fiscal policy which would in the end bring increased affluence to every class in society and thus relax the tensions which in the hungry 1830s and 40s threatened revolution in Britain’. Disraeli was the dreamer and the word-smith, Peel the doer. Both men achieved notable changes in the interests of the nation and of social ...”

“... the essays edited by Jane Lewis as Labour and Love give clear examples of children of the working class supporting their parents. All Dr Macfarlane has established is that the better-off received little revenue from their children once the children were grown up. The thesis might have been wider if he had deployed the enormous wealth of information about the ...”

“... 34,650 of Boeing’s employees, almost all of whom regard themselves as belonging to the middle class – showed that just over 20 per cent thought their own job was ‘somewhat secure’, while over 50 percent declared themselves ‘not secure’. At the last count (on 31 December 1994) 4.9 million Americans were under some form of ‘correctional ...”

“... the children of academics, but the degree to which it mitigates the cultural disadvantages of class. It delivers proficiency for all, in the manner of accredited driving lessons. But that implies a minimisation of risk-taking and the establishment of acceptable margins for error. This is an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a ...”

“... workers and the governing elite. Unemployment surged after the demobilisation of soldiers when war ended in 1815; a severe depression in the textile industry combined with food prices kept high by the protectionist Corn Laws (introduced in 1815) brought the poor to the brink of starvation. The stark new multistorey cotton mills of Manchester and Salford ...”

“... dainty way around that ‘reeking network of slums’ which is Edinburgh’s Old Town. Social class, inevitably, raises its head from time to time throughout these essays. Elaine Showalter sees the anti-heroes of Ladlit as obsessed with class distinctions, as well as being ‘funny, bright . . . charming and ...”

“... Desmond favours a version of ‘was your grandmother a monkey?’, and gives it a plausible class twist. The Bishop was a gentleman, and confident in the identity and ladylike character of his own grandmother, and the grandmothers of the kind of people he sparred with. But Huxley never knew his granny, coming from a stratum where the existence of ...”

“... to pursue in minute detail topics as untrendy as the doctrinal disputes of pre-First World War socialists or the social and economic consequences of the Black Plague. That she has escalated her demands during the last twenty years while enlarging the circle of her readers suggests that she is a woman of distinctive talents. Ideally, a consideration of ...”

“... Inquiry, established to investigate the behaviour of his predecessor in the run-up to the Iraq War; and the best-known Mark Fisher was Tony Blair’s former arts minister, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central – it had recently been revealed in the local paper that he’d claimed parliamentary expenses for items including a face-painting set, a packet ...”