“... Lunch (1983), the script for which was written by McEwan. In both cases, a young man from a class background about which he is very uneasy, who has an ailing mother, an interest in history, and wishes to write a book, falls for a girl from an upper-middle-class, bohemian family, only to find that she will not sleep ...”

“... by Alun Lewis in 1941, while he was stationed with the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, ready for war but not yet called to action. It’s a poem about being bored and being grateful for the boredom since worse is to come. ‘We talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome.’ Beyond the humdrum detail – groundsheets, dirty socks, Woodbines – the mood is ...”

“... of which he was the self-appointed mythologer. Whatever his doubts about the philistine middle-class Gaels who made the revolution, one of whom compounded the offence by stealing his sweetheart as well as his political thunder, his poetry remains on terms with politics in a way that much English Modernism does not. In these volatile conditions, the poet ...”

“... of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class communities were apparently able to learn the useful strategies of liminality, of being both part of the culture that surrounded them by class allegiance and sympathy (as in the case of the Roberts and Evans ...”

“... fittings. Multibillionaires don’t tend to have great taste.In a half-facetious account of social class in the United States in the early Reagan era, Paul Fussell – better known for his cultural histories of the First and Second World Wars – mapped yacht ownership onto position on the social ladder. ‘Because it’s the most expensive, yachting beats all ...”

“... professional and business fraternities. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in ...”

“... reinforcing our sense of innate British superiority, instead reveal the truth about our own scene: class struggle, violence, exploitation. Alan’s infatuation with the film star Louise Vipond is drunkenly transferred, in a slapstick ventriloquial routine, to a tailor’s dummy, figuring forth, in the words of the Chorus, ‘the general love’ for a fantasy ...”

“... made up of journalists, army pensioners, Nonconformists, progressive aristocrats and middle-class families living in the newly built villas. But with limited imagination for the inner lives of others, and little patience with her own, Thompson’s account of Laura’s adolescence is brief and not entirely kind: She fell into hero-worship of an elderly ...”

“... detail the refinements and changes in Hobbes’s ideas about freedom as the English Civil War proceeded. His account of Hobbes is characteristically lucid, elegant and, on its own terms, persuasive. It is indeed very hard to make sense of Hobbes – or any other political thinker – without situating him within the urgent debates of his time and ...”

“... And things may be different at Harvard. Those who know Pipes only as a hardliner during the Cold War heyday of the Reagan years may doubt his credentials as an iconoclast. But what else is one to call someone who invokes Lytton Strachey (twice!) as an exemplar in the writing of history and quotes with approval Samuel Butler’s ‘I never write on any ...”

“... Clancy, who spent his last thirty years in Los Angeles writing screenplays, among them In Love and War (1996), about Ernest Hemingway’s First World War experiences, and Frida (2002), a biopic about Frida Kahlo, had been a ‘movie balcony bug’ from the age of five. ‘The heart,’ he wrote, ‘never has to be lonely in ...”

“... than the structural injustices of capitalism, even though the ANC – which read racism back onto class struggle – used his work to publicise their cause. White employees in the mines, he noted, ‘even those working underground, and designated as miners, never touch pick or shovel or drilling machines. The brute work is done by Africans.’ His photos of ...”

“... those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been men of special grace, the irreplaceable flower ...”

“... closed to them in May 1940 with ‘the final collapse of Chamberlain’s efforts to end the war’, as the authors inaccurately put it. Churchill disliked Scottish Conservatism, and the corporative-regionalist policies followed both by wartime and postwar governments had no place for them. They were further isolated by the remarkable invasion of ...”

“... kind of popularity which dominates a mass market, but they gave the client’s product a touch of class. The BBC, before it knew what a ratings war was, and Vogue, before the advertising pages got to be smarter than the editorial ones, used them. Minton was briefly one of the frail pillars of that universe of good ...”