Sarah Churchwell

“Top-up fees mean that universities are increasingly under pressure to confer degrees upon students, who perceive the degree as a commodity they've purchased. Failure doesn't enter into anyone's calculations.”

“Textbooks are no longer given to schoolchildren; they're too expensive. So they're given to the teachers, who probably need them more.”

“Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.”

“The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.”

“'Sesame Street' was a pioneering educational T.V. show, intended to help underprivileged children. But even those of us middle-class kids spoilt for pedagogical choice couldn't get enough of it.”

“If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.”

“There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.”

“Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.”

“Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.”

“People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.”

“History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares.”

“In all likelihood, the only thing extraordinary about Tiger Woods was his golf: he had extraordinary coordination and extraordinary discipline - on the course, at any rate. That discipline was the source of his power.”

“History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.”

“Expression and thought are inextricably linked: crude language permits only crude thinking.”

“In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.”