“... says, and a little later she’s pulling coins out of her purse for yet another donation. ‘A class gulf existed between our lives and those of the cleaners,’ Rowbotham wrote in 2008. ‘We were nearly all young, bouncy, in our twenties … The reality of the women’s lives was remote from us.’ At the time, Alexander wrote that ‘the dreary round of ...”

“... propounded in The Leopard angered the Communist and fellow-travelling intelligentsia of post-war Italy. Yet Lampedusa’s scepticism was the product, not of reactionary ideals or aristocratic nostalgia, but of a strong sense of his island’s history. He did not deny Progress its place in England and France, but he was sceptical about its application to ...”

“... won independence from British rule in 1960, the country descended into a two-and-a-half-year civil war during which between 500,000 and three million people died, mostly from starvation. In the words of Ọbáfẹmi Awólọ́wọ́, then the federal minister of finance, ‘all is fair, and starvation is one of the weapons of ...”

“... in them or a magnum of pink champagne. He was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper class were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them.’ Mrs Fleming wrote a great many letters to Evelyn Waugh, telling him where she’d had lunch and where she’d had supper and who’d been there and made a fool of ...”

“... and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair MacLean (‘Ach, any idiot can write a book’) did not bequeath a hero who became a household name, but he left a clutch ...”

“... would have been nowhere without him. He wasn’t resented on personal grounds alone, however; class, or else race, came into it, too. Bradman was Protestant English, his family having emigrated from rural East Anglia to rural New South Wales halfway through the 19th century; he was born on a smallholding. Fingleton and O’ Reilly, along with others in ...”

“... of America. What’s a girl without congenital wealth to do if she hasn’t been blessed with some class-effacing talent or exceptional looks, when she knows that success in life is the result of an individual’s effort? Grasp the opportunity; go for surgery – which, it would seem from the association of beauty with an opera audition, is likely to take care ...”

“... one has rejected, if only by mocking them. Isherwood’s prejudices against his family and his class were clearly ways of keeping them in mind, and his brother and his mother – who dies as these diaries begin – are never far from his thoughts. Going to America in the 1930s became a way of thinking about growing up in England before the First World ...”

“... The debate over Ireland’s decision to maintain neutrality during the Second World War periodically resurfaces in the letters page of the Irish Times, exposing the cracks in established political pieties. The challenge tends to come from those resistant to the idea that the political circumstances of the time made neutrality the most rational policy ...”

“... twenty years ago, ‘extrapolating from trends’, judged that ‘the steady increase since the war in the numbers in sixth forms, and in those getting good results in their A-level examinations, would continue.’ But for Helen Gardner, who served at that time on the Robbins Committee on Higher Education, those confident extrapolators of trends figure ...”

“... the creation of the Committee of Imperial Defence. But after Britain’s performance in the Boer War no prime minister could have left things as they were. Reform had been long overdue even before South Africa laid bare our military deficiencies. Balfour, characteristically, did nothing drastic. Ten years earlier a Ministry of Defence had been advocated ...”

“... modelled – Brendan Bracken. Even in the political fluidity of the Thirties and the Second World War, Bracken, with his self-created and well-advertised mystique as a man of mystery, taxed to the limit the Tories’ appetite for self-made adventurers, already fully tested in the past by such as Disraeli and ‘F.E.’ Bracken, on the face of it, seemed the ...”

“... improper use of public office for private gain – was a charge levelled at the British political class for 150 years, and it still has weight today. Allegations of political corruption cut through to voters because the terms involved are immediately comprehensible: money and greed. Yet while the issues raised are at one level universal, they are also ...”

“... Carter, saying, in essence: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."’ Nouvel Observateur: ‘And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?’ Brzezinski: ‘What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet ...”

“... When he died in April 1945 Americans were enjoying unprecedented prosperity and victory in the war had catapulted the country from the margins of international politics to the rank of global superpower. These were some of the most dramatic years in American history and FDR was always centre-stage. Cartoonists regularly depicted him striding into ...”