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“... 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 ...”

“... a menace to society. The publication was in fact Tribune, when Aneurin Bevan was its editor and George Orwell its literary editor. That I was writing about art and occasionally literature for a leading weekly review within three years of being chucked out of school could reasonably have been seen as a sign of regeneration; he chose to present it as a ...”

“... Labour Party, a gulf always existed between the thinkers quoted in set-pieces – Marx, Tawney, Orwell and the rest – and the trade-union argot of the smoke-filled rooms, where decisions were brokered. In short, picking out ‘influential’ left-of-centre thinkers is tricky. Yet there have been a handful of works that have helped to put the aspirations ...”

“... a common enough formulation among the interpreters of Western Communist behaviour nowadays: thus George Urban, in prefacing a series of interviews with PCI leaders which he conducted for Encounter and Radio Free Europe, has concluded that ‘Eurocommunism is a freak which must either end in Social Democracy or revert to some form of Leninism.’ On the far ...”

“... wiped a floured hand and tuned in the wireless –sad Elgar, crackling, then death of our King George the Sixth.The Coronation, double-featured with ‘The Conquest of Everest’, is purveyed to the provinces via a ‘gaudily faded Regal’. A small boy at the Junior school, overseen by the caring Miss Clio (‘genuine name, “Miss Clio” is, by the ...”