When you hear that Vicky Pollard describing her, being surprised by her pregnancy, I mean how do you, how do you react to that? Do you find anything about it funny or is what you have to say in your book about the stereotyping of these members of the working class stops you from laughing?

no actual authentic representation of how working-class people in this country actually live on a day-to-day basis

Class has been called an ‘unspeakable’ identity that is seldom discussed.

The debate about this dominance of a public school elite

These connections might also be associated with patterns of difference: of experience, education, culture, and even of identity. These are, after all, people who might identify with one another, recognising ‘people like us’. Not all identities and patterns of difference are so directly connected to inequality

wellconnected people accumulate wealth and power (reflecting the popular sociological observation that ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know that counts’).

wellconnected people accumulate wealth and power (reflecting the popular sociological observation that ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know that counts’). In parallel, disconnected people (like the ‘Street People’discussed in Chapter 1) are likely to experience marginality and exclusion, and may be treated as different from the norm. Indeed, as I was writing this chapter in 2013, there was a debate going on about the dominance of public school educated people in the UK, started by the last non-public school educated Prime Minister, John Major, who said:‘In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class’ (BBC News, 2013).

The chapter turns to two case studies that offer instructive examples of the connections and disconnections between bodies and society in the case of disability and gender.

Well they are of course individual experiences but they're ones that are widely shared.These are things that if you talk to a vast range of people living in poverty you'd hear very similar things.And that’s because what they're speaking about is a sort of systematic set of social reactions to poverty and to poor people.In the process, poor people are stigmatised.They are judged as being inadequate.That poverty, as it were, results from them being poor people.That there's something in their moral character, their make up that makes them become poor and that, in a very powerful way in the present day, we treat poverty as though it is their own fault.

Hayek's political influence reached its height in 1986, when Mrs Thatcher's government swept away much of the regulation that had constrained the city of London

To Hayek, the market does most good when it's most free

That means that while the one per cent is doing very well, the rest of them are doing worse.The author thinks it's fundamental to an understanding of what is going on in the politics, in the economy, and in the society today.While the top has been doing very well, those in the middle - in the median - has not.Median income today in the United States is lower than it was a decade and a half ago.

That the level of inequality, and the way inequality is created in the United States, has resulted in our economy performing more poorly than it would if we had less inequality

the chances of somebody going from the bottom to the middle, the bottom to the top, are lower in the United States than even in northern Europe.

Hayek makes a moral argument that government's attempts to control the economy enslave its people.

Hayek worried they would never let go