“... he could expect to be upgraded, or at least to have ‘flight attendants smuggle me first-class meals in coach’. In restaurants, ‘waiters refuse to give me a cheque. Even toll collectors on highways, who will never see me again, refuse to take my money.’ They often tell him what he already knows: ‘Robert F. Kennedy was the greatest president ...”

“... doctors, throws light on how clever women suffering from the miseries and frustrations of middle-class Victorian life used invalidism, often consciously, but even more interestingly, unconsciously, to protect their vulnerabilities and nurse their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett ...”

“... he slipped into madness: he became obsessed with the devil’s march through the city’s working class and conducted exorcisms. Carles Puigdemont, the regional prime minister (president in Catalan), is the 130th man to run the Generalitat, the body which from the 14th century ran Catalonia under the watchful eye of Spain’s Aragonese or Castilian ...”

“... thousand on the night of 5 September. It was the greatest single French loss of the Second World War.The transatlantic liners that once made Le Havre almost chic have gone, but the sea is still just about the only way to get there from London. On a moonlit winter evening, as the shore approaches, the town lays itself out beneath an electric halo, the Church ...”

“... in Mao’s long career that he was evidently proud of, alongside victory in the 1946-49 Civil War; he said as much when he was interviewed by the American journalist Edgar Snow in the 1970s. It was also the most dramatic expression of his antagonism towards intellectuals, a consistent trait in his otherwise capricious career. From 1951, campaigns of ...”

“... brands were planning to raise their prices, millennials started to queue outside the shops. Middle-class Chinese usually go abroad on holiday and to do their luxury shopping, but this year, thanks to Covid-19, the estimated $300 billion spent on overseas consumption is staying at home. This is good news for the government: boosting domestic demand is central ...”

“... multi-directional split of the electorate’ on certain deeply-felt issues, which he lists as class, clericalism, the constitution and colonialism. He writes about the Left, the Right and the Centre, and uses terms like ‘majority’ and ‘opposition’, but without attaching any significance to this terminology beyond what can be explained by the ...”

“... working in concert. Neighbourhoods are broken apart, the dispossessed herded into the working-class suburbs to the north and east of the city. Money takes over. Life proceeds through indirect contact, calculation and enumeration supplant the old social relationships. Meanwhile, among the expanding middle class, leisure ...”

“... armies. The only form of warfare in which such forces can survive is irregular or guerrilla war, and Emmet had no idea of this. (Indeed Elliott shows that the United leadership had a ‘terror of popular guerrilla warfare’.) The inner contradiction of conspiratorialism, which she does not really confront, is that the secrecy vital to the preparatory ...”

“... a world very similar to that inhabited by his Virginian ancestors in the days before the Civil War. Baker’s mother and grandmother worked without benefit of electricity, gas or plumbing. While their menfolk laboured in the fields, they killed chickens, canned vegetables, scrubbed floors, baked bread, chopped wood and hauled water. After days of such ...”

“... after September 1939 when Sartre was called up and after June 1940 when he was a prisoner of war. They reveal what is often forgotten – that Sartre had an excellent sense of humour. There is nonetheless something disagreeable, and eventually tedious, about his insistence on telling Beauvoir about his affairs with other women. In the spring of 1948 when ...”

“... if necessary, language into his meaning.’ But ‘the poet’, in Eliot’s sentence, has upper-class responsibilities which don’t exert much of a claim upon Harrison’s working-class sensibility. He prefers to write of local occasions: how things are going in Newcastle, what’s new in Leeds, hard living in foreign ...”

“... and cultural, educational and moral’. Like Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, which it resembles (despite major differences in assumptions and methods) in its combination of analytical and imaginative power and in its vigorous prose, not to mention its length, it is a major contribution to social history and one of the seminal works ...”

“... Two of the finest works of post-war Sicilian fiction were published in Italy in 1958: Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard and Leonardo Sciascia’s Sicilian Uncles, a collection of three (in subsequent editions four) stories dealing with themes from Sicily’s history and experience of foreign intervention which had also interested Lampedusa ...”

“... or irritated gesture on the part of a small intellectual élite around the time of World War One has become the firm orthodoxy of the middle-brow mass. The Victorians have retained their demonised status despite the emergence of powerful rivals, as later periods slip back across the line marking off the historical past. Even the Sixties have come in ...”