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“... 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 ...”

“... of paying people to scrap their cars, we might as well burn ten-pound notes in power stations,’ George Monbiot told the BBC. Some of the firms the incentive scheme is intended to help have been afraid the move would leave them out of pocket. Honda, Ford and Vauxhall have been reluctant to take part. But however doubtful industry experts have been, 35,000 ...”

“... already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine ...”

“... time that it has become the predominant idea of Brandt that he was the photographic equivalent of Orwell or J.B. Priestley. Delany successfully shows this reading to be inaccurate, and one of the virtues of his account is the way it traces the evolution of Brandt’s photography as it passes through the various genres, seeing them as experimental stages in ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already ...”

“... they merely tell with brilliant concision a hard truth about the shit that happens to happen. Orwell, who had his doubts about some things in the poem, nevertheless thought it the best bit of writing to emerge from that war; but, convinced of its bad faith, Auden suppressed it. When, with immense good grace, he gave permission for it to appear alongside ...”