“... of Rome, cultivation was an expression of the naturally superior qualities of the dominant class. Education differentiated haves from have-nots (and from many of the have-somes), and legitimised the vast and unquestioned power that the elite – usually the male elite – held. There were elementary ‘schools’ – ludi – for the less ...”

“... drawing master, Henry Tonks, called it – caught the moment when the academic rigour of the life class was beginning to be infused with stirrings of the new. Carrington entered the school in the year of Fry’s exhibition, around the same time as Gertler, Nevinson and the Nash brothers. She won a scholarship in 1912 and two awards for figure painting. One of ...”

“... retail developers, corporate headhunters, district attorneys. Their names suggest American middle-class innocence: Kenny, Johnny, Freddie. Only one of them, Billy Mogavero, is left behind. Billy went to jail for assaulting a cop, and now he is stuck in Winship, working as a clerk in a paint store. The lever of the plot tips when, years having passed, the ...”

“... to them with the most un-Christian rancour. For the offence of failing to give Reith a World War Two appointment of sufficient importance, Churchill was ‘that bloody shit’. For accepting the Viceroyship of India that Reith coveted, Mountbatten was ‘that playboy’. One war back, the nasty bullet wound in ...”

“... however, he tackles a subject potentially more open to revision than that, say, of Hitler’s War – one whose intrinsic drama can serve as a vehicle for rather more subtle expressions of the ideology of the ‘radical right’. The events of October and early November 1956 in Hungary do not, by common consent of the historians who have looked at ...”

“... Military and police murder squads roamed Argentina’s cities and villages during the Dirty War in search of anyone answering to the definition offered by General Jorge Rafael Videla: ‘A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilisation ...”

“... inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the relation of middle-class Unionism to working-class Unionism, or – to put it in cultural terms – the relation of Establishment and anti-Establishment ideas within Unionism. As Unionism cracks and splinters, a form of ...”

“... English doing as well as the Czechs or the Dutch? My answer begins from the special hold here of class on culture. The culture of art in England is genteel. It is tied to Home Counties, late-imperial class values and attitudes in ways – with a depth and tightness of affiliation – that mark it out from Turin or St ...”

“... raises the question Yalom wants answered – ‘who owns the breast?’ Anxiety to keep the upper-class woman’s bust in its perfection, as well to maintain her health, supported the employment of wet-nurses during the lifetimes of Richardson and Rousseau. This often involved the dismissal of the infant from the family home – Jane Austen’s mother, for ...”

“... its industrial machine, far behind the lines, in greater strength than before. It was the British war effort that had become the sideshow. The consequences of the remorseless Soviet advance from the ruins of Stalingrad to the ruins of Berlin are still very much with us today. Not only is the present political complexion of Eastern Europe determined by that ...”

“... had been established as a result of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-7). In the First World War, Britain and Russia first occupied and then divided the country in order to keep the Ottoman-German armies at bay. The end of the war brought no respite. The Red Army threatened from the north and Britain, already ...”

“... they walked up and down shooting them. Not one of the allegedly ‘searing’ films about the war – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket or Platoon – has dared to show anything remotely like the truth of this and many other similar episodes, more evocative of Poland or the Ukraine in 1941. And the thing of it was, as Ron pointed out, that it was ...”

“... scene, in the process revealing and reproducing, as Showalter describes it, ‘structures of class and gender that were “moral”, that is, “normal”, by their own standards’. Classification was quite central to the production of a docile and harmonious community (essential, in the words of the Scottish alienist W.A.F. Browne, if one were ‘to ...”

“... Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the Manifesto. From the Marquis de Sade through Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Alfred Jarry and Raymond Roussel, most of the antecedents he named were French, and ...”

“... and star turn on the baseball team at Yale and the stint as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. His crash in the Pacific brought him dangerously close to being captured by the Japanese, who, like Jr’s administration, practised torture – the charge of cannibalism is added to show there’s a difference. From there Dad’s exploits tend to mix ...”