And there was little love lost between Mr Hague's young classless advisers and the older, patrician Lord Cranborne.

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Hamburgers are classless, too: they are consumed by scruffy kids, but have been admired by movie stars and presidents, not least Bill Clinton.

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Barak and Livni's behavior was not wrong simply because it is classless to attack your country's elected leadership while visiting in foreign lands.

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Americans like to think that they live in a classless society, which seems to accord better with the egalitarian promises of the Declaration of Independence.

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From the vantage point of the supposedly classless 1990s, the effort which Anthony Wedgwood Benn put into reinventing himself as plain Tony Benn may sound like an affectation.

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For Poland, with 39m people the biggest of the aspiring entrants by far, European integration will feel like a muted reprise of the 1989 revolution, which turned a supposedly classless stasis into a capitalist melee of winners and losers.

ECONOMIST: Unfinished business | The

In his scepticism towards grand plans, and in the privileged background he shares with many colleagues (a political handicap, confess Tories too canny to believe Britain has become classless), he seems to follow more naturally in the tradition of patrician Tory leaders such as Harold Macmillan.

ECONOMIST: The Conservatives in government