Search Results

“... with the Big House was a remote fact of history; they belonged to the Protestant merchant class, and neither the Yeatses nor the Pollexfens, who were fairly rich, had genuine aristocratic pretensions. In the midst of Catholic Sligo they were bourgeois and Protestant, but also Irish and proud of it. Yet Yeats declined to think of himself as an Irish ...”

“... and defiance rather than as escape, a mystical as well as a political union with the working class (working, but for the moment unemployed). Lehmann kept them more or less happy with money, clothes, cigarette-lighters and fountain-pens. It was, as he wrote himself, ‘a contact with earthiness that I needed very badly’. He desired wholeness, and ...”

“... in Henry Fielding, who was not only a novelist, a playwright and a magistrate but a prolific high-class journalist and editor. In his day there were no book reviews as such, though books might be discussed along with other matters of topical interest. Soon, in the mid-century, a more specialised literary journalism took hold. The preferred style was of ...”

“... of Lady with the Red Lamp, imaginatively caring for the wanking-wounded, the casualties of the sex war. But there are many differences between her set-up in Streatham and the predicament of streetwalkers like Carol and Sharon. For one thing, she doesn’t – or didn’t during her years as a madam – need to simulate any sort of submission to the horny ...”

“... There are occasional flights of millennial fancy about the imminent unity of the Northern working class, but that is about all. The basic unreality of Northern policy has been underlined, as never before, by the controversy about the proposed amendment to the Constitution on the question of abortion. Just before the first General Election of 1981, a small ...”

“... masterpiece Nuer Religion (1956), of which cynics have remarked that it exhibits the Nuer as first-class Jesuit dialecticians. Now, no specialist would want to question the value of these Cairo essays. Though hard to get at in printed form, they were widely circulated in mimeograph for many years. The evidence for development is less obvious. As E-P himself ...”

“... a nine-page appendix illustrating the essence of Leninism. He includes hefty chunks of Lenin on War and Peace, Civil Liberties, Dictatorship and Democracy, giving precise references to his Selected or Collected Works in English and Russian. But he provides no dates, and divorced from his setting in time, Lenin, as a good Marxist, loses almost all of his ...”

“... trying to cheat them. His girlfriend, Candy, wears a skintight yellow jumpsuit to a job-training class, then is devastated when she is told she looks ‘tacky’. Ray wants so desperately to be a real businessman that he even forbids anyone to sell drugs in his social club. But he can’t negotiate the maze of bureaucratic rules and regulations governing new ...”

“... It was a way of participating in high life while rejecting it, which attracted the new reading class, as did the immediacy of the aim. It satisfied a hunger for rituals. Mrs Barbauld rightly pointed out that old ghost and fairy stories had long had the aim of terrifying us pleasurably; but unmasked and stated openly it foreshadowed the industry of movie ...”

“... as it increasingly did to many Victorian writers, and which made her so popular with a growing class of thoughtful and responsible readers. This idiom has made a comeback today, and is often to be heard in the higher political correctness of contemporary bien pensantes, but to be fair to Gaskell (it’s perhaps too late to start calling her Stevenson ...”

“... likely to experience vivid indignation or contempt at the way in which human beings are shaped by class, periods and settings.) At the same time, Hobhouse must count as an English writer, too. Like her heroine, whom Janet Hobhouse closely resembles, she had an English father, and in part, if reluctantly, she adopted England as a country (not the country) of ...”

“... of his life in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City – a drab working-class satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing ...”

“... or England is on hold for the foreseeable future. While Britain shifts hesitantly onto a ‘war-footing’, the cultural and economic divides that split the nation in two in the summer of 2016 have been suspended, save for the self-separation of a privileged few who are able to escape to a remote island or hunker down in the country pile for a few ...”

“... I said.That’s not true, she said.Maybe they didn’t matter.Objecting to a new memoir-writing class, Lilia suggests flower arranging would be more practical; that way, ‘you can plan your own funeral display.’ Her bad temper doesn’t bother the other residents – it’s as if they’ve been gentled into submission while they await the inevitable ...”

“... But French support continued to dwindle. By 1408 the campaign had degenerated into a guerrilla war, and by early 1409 the self-proclaimed Prince of Wales was a desperate and hunted man. The revolt destroyed what little trust existed between the English and the Welsh inhabitants of Wales, shattering any pretence of parity between them. Despite the fact that ...”