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“... wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ it will say to itself about a quarrel or a war, some episode of general misery. English consciousness admits this general truth with a smile and a shrug, while not taking it too seriously. It can live beside it and around it. But the Russian intelligent – still more the Russian poet – flings himself ...”

“... with the far more portentous international issues that emerged in the 1950s – the Cold War, the nuclear bomb and so on. Some people professed to see decolonisation as the culmination of British imperialism, rather than as a reverse; the ‘logical conclusion’, as Hyam puts it, ‘of the policy of successive governments’, going back possibly to ...”

“... While intellectuals in the orbit of the French Communist Party were vacillating over the Algerian war of independence, he gave his unconditional support to the rebels, a stance that nearly got him killed by an OAS bomb planted outside his flat. He contributed fiery prefaces not only to Fanon’s book, but to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of Négritude ...”

“... us that the most inappropriate, seemingly irrational forms of behaviour can surface during a war. People can be calm when they should be anxious, excited or inspired when they should be afraid. More simply, as our popular vocabulary attests, danger is something we ‘walk into’ or towards which we ‘turn a blind eye’. Even now business carries on as ...”

“... trying to live on it for the rest of your life. Unlike Britain or the United States, where middle-class retirees tend to boost their state pension either with a pension paid for by their employer or a privately invested fund designed, by tax law, to be eked out till death, it became common in Cyprus to retire with a large, tax-free lump sum with which you ...”

“... if I had adopted this theory at the conservatory, my pupils would all have committed suicide; my class would have been strewn with dead bodies!’ Cage was not so much a composer as a ‘destroyer’, and if composers were tasked with any duty, it was to create.What Sholl offers is a portrait of an artist who was both a fervent believer and a rebel, an ...”

“... hands quite so dirty. As E.P. Thompson grudgingly conceded in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.’ In fact, Thompson mused, you could write a convincing history of English radicalism ...”

“... odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone Else’s War (2003), has information to gather. He makes a call. ‘The phone booth smelled of urine; someone had spat generously on the floor and a loud argument in Cantonese was going on at the stamp counter.’ Booths should keep sound both out and in. They should be ...”

“... coercion appears unacceptable to New Labour. Many of the worst excesses of Britain’s managerial class could be curbed by amendments to the Companies Act. But, it seems, there are to be no such amendments because they would be coercive, and therefore offensive to those they sought to coerce. At present, the only people New Labour appears unafraid to offend ...”

“... concluding quotation from Marx, the motivations and disappointments of an utterly ordinary middle-class couple in a consumerist culture. Sylvie and Jérôme are both public opinion analysts, as indeed was Perec at the time: they emerge as a kind of generically rootless Parisian couple of the Sixties, whose experiences and emotions are such that no one of that ...”

“... outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for ...”

“... about, in clay – a ‘telltale sign,’ observes Kramer, ‘of an immaculate, urban middle-class upbringing’. Simonds moved on to making models of primitive landscapes filled with the ‘habitations of an imaginary race of migratory little people’ which have proved popular both with museums and with private collectors. I haven’t seen the films of ...”

“... of a strong intelligence are inseparable. And no doubt those polarities derive in part from her class and her history: the dryness and smartness from an upper-class style, the excess from a long tradition of Irish Protestant gothic, as well as from her own experience.Bowen was an only child, born in 1899 in Dublin where ...”

“... black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible. So it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. And it is particularly at times when the state takes reality into its own hands, and sets about ...”

“... sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for selling a pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield attacking the war with France and the corruptions of Pitt’s Government. An excellent life of Johnson, by Gerald Tyson, was published in 1979; since then, research in the cultural and political history of the late 18th century, and more specifically in the book trade, has ...”