“... at Berkeley in the spring of 1975, Joan Didion confessed that she had stolen the title of George Orwell’s celebrated attempt at an explanation because she liked the idea of ‘three short unambiguous words’ that ‘share a sound’. ‘In many ways,’ Didion declared, ‘writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... given up meat long ago. Along with all this he was seriously studying socialism; fired by Henry George, he was instructed mainly by Marx, whom he actually read (in French). Soon he was an indispensable Fabian. He worked like the devil – it is quite a relief to find him talking about his ‘inveterate laziness’, and to learn that on some days he ‘did ...”

“... obtrusive commentaries, this consists of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive reasoned analysis’, which it is ...”

“... change policies from within. Yet despite herself she exacerbated the frictions of Cold War. Like George Kennan, with whom she otherwise has little in common, she slipped ideas into the policy-making bloodstream, where they took on a life of their own. Her notions about the way Russian child development shaped Soviet politics only emboldened American ...”

“... and precious after all, and is in fact largely written by the petite bourgeoisie (Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot)? I don’t think, as Carey does, that Elizabeth Bowen ‘goes beyond’ Henry James (whom Carey doesn’t seem to like) in her ability to depict inner thought and feeling, and I am unable to make sense of his claim that Lucky Jim represents ‘one ...”

“... puts it, ‘straightforwardly hypocritical’. Runciman’s more lasting Eton friendship with George ‘Dadie’ Rylands set the tone for much that was to follow. They both went on to Cambridge, where Rylands was invited to take up his place two terms early because the provost of King’s was in urgent need of an Electra for his ...”

“... say, Barrington Moore’s observations on dictatorship and democracy, let alone from Schumpeter or Orwell. She did, however, have a strong sense of the sheer vastness of the Nazi phenomenon, affecting even its victims and people who were ostensibly quite neutral. It is in fact easy enough (though inadequate) to account for Hitler in terms of his ...”

“... reading of Kafka. He sees Winston and Julia’s illicit, furtive love affair, and the efforts of Orwell’s thought police to do away with sex and sexuality, as an account of the lives of gay men in London in 1948, the year the novel was written. Woods quotes passages like this: ‘He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were ...”

“... counterpoint to The Orators or Down and Out in Paris and London.‘The young Auden, the young Orwell, longing for signs of change, angry and impatient at the persistence of ingrained forms of social injustice or inequality of wealth, speak of the same world as Peterley’s but seen from the opposite angle,’ John Wain has written. ‘There is no evidence ...”

“... Ernest Hamel worshipped him, the socialist historians Mathiez and Lefebvre championed him, George Sand called him ‘the greatest man not only of the Revolution but of all known history’. Lord Acton described him as ‘the most hateful character in the forefront of human history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men’. In ...”

“... Quentin chapter of The Sound and the Fury) obscures the attempt at honest praise of the labour of George Gudger. Why did Agee fluff and pamper this conventional theme of the writer as criminal? The enigmatic figure of Edgar had somehow become for him an image of the suffering artist – the character possibly getting entangled with a memory of Lear’s speech ...”