“... whose best older celebrants have been men of letters who were men of action, including Yeats, Orwell and Foot, rather than academics who make a preening performance of not really being academics, like John Fraser and Edward Said. Fraser on this author cannot match Said’s remarkable amalgam of souped-up abstractionism and overpowering factual ...”

“... I am still alive and well.’ The piquancy of this novel is that it must be ‘about’ George Lukacs (born von Lukacs). Publicly, Lukacs is still the Marxist theoretician best-known and most cited in the West (although Brecht and Benjamin are catching up with him). Sennett uses the novel’s penetrative licence to explore the pathology of Marxist ...”

“... by the release of Windows 95, the largest bit of media marionetting since Apple ‘repurposed’ Orwell, but it also saw the upgrading of Gates’s increasingly inescapable public persona. From retiring computer geek (who turned his company into a market leader with the skill of the most venal corporate raider) to folksy patrician of next-century information ...”

“... with flawed personalities and flyblown reputations – into the stuff of compelling biography. Orwell once claimed that everything he wrote had a socialist purpose. It could almost be said of Pimlott that everything he writes bears witness to his faith in the continuing validity and importance of mainstream Labour politics. In True Blues the authors remark ...”

“... incisive discussions of intellectuals, from Julien Benda, Thomas Mann, Eliot and Woolf through Orwell, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, Mulhern sketches the collective portrait of what he calls ‘Kulturkritik’. He is not blind to Kulturkritik’s virtues, but more interested in what’s wrong with it – namely, its political side effects. Speaking ...”

“... go to Dickens, Gissing and Mayhew, or, for industrial towns during the Depression, Priestley and Orwell? Such authors are quoted here, but less copiously than they would once have been, no doubt because their readings are now often felt to be singular or distorted. The modern urban historian feels happier with original testimony – diaries, letters, the ...”

“... favourite offered opportunities galore for score-settling with enemies, whether big beasts, like George Osborne and the chancellor, Philip Hammond, or smaller fry in the office, like Katie Perrior, May’s official director of communications, who had dared to direct communications, an area of activity that fell squarely within Hill’s bailiwick. The book is ...”

“... can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in time, Orwell’s canine explorations into the political beliefs of his contemporaries ...”

“... bought the house in which I shall be murdered.’There are different accounts of how Bacon met George Dyer late in 1963. One is that Dyer, a rather good-looking cat burglar from the East End of London, fell through Bacon’s skylight like a gift from heaven, and that Bacon threatened to call the police if Dyer didn’t have sex with him. They are more ...”

“... the common soldier’s point of view and in his idiom, or a laundered version of it; and this, as Orwell pointed out, is seldom successful, however politically proper the idea. A convention of rough dialect simply gets in the way, as it does in ‘Drake’s Drum’, another immensely successful poem which Newbolt wrote at the same period. But it is altogether ...”

“... as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were “not brainy”.’ Stevenson reminds us that the magazine wasn’t always either safe or respectable: to disturb the peace was ...”

“... with the moral, but it doesn’t convince. Miller proceeds with the argument by referring to George Orwell’s difficulties with disgust. To feel disgust is to feel threatened with contamination, as Orwell suggests in The Road to Wigan Pier. Whereas contempt remains complacent, disgust is intolerable and therefore ...”

“... importance and connecting structure is tantalisingly omitted. The effect is reminiscent of what Orwell describes in 1984, when Winston Smith ventures into the proles’ sector to quiz an old man in a pub about what the past was really like, before the Revolution. All he gets is ‘a rubbish heap of details ... they remembered a million useless things, a ...”

“... robbers and friendly neighbourhood gangsters, or the kind of suburban criminal and crime Orwell described just after the war in ‘Decline of the English Murder’: one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader’s point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist ...”

“... need of your country’s manufactures,’ the Qianlong emperor bluntly stated in a letter to George III in 1793. The solution was to emulate the VOC and offer opium as a commodity that would generate its own demand: the addictive cycle on which every drug cartel depends.Opium was not unfamiliar to the British. In the form of laudanum, a mixture of opium ...”