“... to soap and, especially, hot water which increasingly differentiated them from the middle classes. George Orwell (born 1903) was, notoriously, taught as a child that ‘the lower classes smell.’ ‘Very early in life,’ he wrote, ‘you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body’; and he quoted Somerset ...”

“... original sin as its schism from New Liberalism, citing its estrangement from ‘Gladstone, Lloyd George, Keynes, Beveridge’. A moment’s thought reveals the fatuity of the diagnosis: Beveridge and Keynes have been the touchstones of the party’s thinking on welfare and economics for most of its existence, such that Labour MPs occasionally forget ...”

“... enough to start with. Right now, the Lib Dems look to me quite like Tony Blair nuzzling up to George Bush. But if I can’t really come up with any government I would have preferred among the options, why am I so appalled? Because, I suppose, pitifully minimal as it was, now there isn’t even a protest vote left. Jenny Diski If it succeeds, the ...”

“... the eyes of God. Nowhere is this shift from margin to centre more striking than in the career of George Bernard Shaw. Born in Dublin in 1856 into a decayed branch of the Protestant Ascendancy, the son of a drunken petty official and a mother from the minor gentry, Shaw was in his own word a ‘downstart’. In this superbly perceptive study, Fintan O’Toole ...”

“... than once, the claim that science is non-political is itself a political claim.Baker was joined by Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-born, Manchester-based physical chemist turned anti-positivist philosopher of science. Through the CCF’s Paris office, the CIA approached Polanyi with the proposal that he edit an occasional newsletter, Science and ...”

“... and which, as the latest general editors point out, would make little sense if the poet was George Herbert. Long reprinted, Bateson’s preface has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For ...”

“... salubrious. In due course Faber issued a volume of tributes. Friends and fans, including Larkin, Michael Hamburger and Kathleen Raine, wrote well and sometimes movingly of a poet who had inspired them by exhortation and example. With Dylan Thomas dead, it was left to George Barker, that other bad boy-genius of New ...”

“... important, in a quite different way, for many Tory MPs. Clegg’s immediately hostile reaction to Michael Gove’s suggestion that O-levels could be restored for brainy children but not for the rest is another instance. Gove, despite what he says, is a social reactionary; Clegg is not. Cameron’s recent musings on the desirability of further welfare cuts ...”

“... In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011) by the American writer George Prochnik shows how ideas of silence slide from literal to figurative as he roams through contemporary multi-track soundscapes made up of sirens, jingles, muzak, bleeps and ringtones, roaring restaurants and bars, police helicopters hovering menacingly over ...”

“... Jeremy Corbyn, however maladroit and out of step with the party’s rebranding since the era of Michael Foot, is the darling of the growing Labour membership, and that his performance in the general election of 2017 vastly exceeded the party’s expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s ...”

“... Who counts in the process, and in what way exactly? Cagily, the city – in the form of Mayor Michael Bloomberg – attempted to trade properties with the cumbersome Port Authority in order to gain control of the site, and to offer Silverstein air rights to other buildings in exchange for the lease. Neither strategy worked, however, and the Port Authority ...”

“... is the deliberate killing of human children who have a right to live. One pro-life activist, Michael Griffin, was recently found guilty of murder because he shot a Florida doctor dead outside an abortion clinic. Though he now claims he was brainwashed, he is reported to have written a letter from jail in which he encouraged other activists to do the ...”

“... Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a British publisher. Pounds have always been a dodgy stock, of course, but still ... Audens, on the other hand, have long been a very judicious buy. ‘In Solitude, for ...”

“... fortress that dominates writing on foreign policy and international affairs’. This is Michael Edwards’s formulation, and his book, Future Positive, urges them to do better. Daniel Bell rises to this challenge in East Meets West, a series of fictional dialogues about human rights in East Asia. Bell’s East Asian interlocutors express some of the ...”

“... unsustainable.Just because the ‘anarchists’ espouse bits of the Neoliberal agenda that even George W. Bush has not yet got to does not mean they are pursuing Neoliberal ends. In Italian autonomist politics, the idea of a guaranteed income developed in the early 1970s not as a means of cutting the welfare bill, but as part of the effort to uncouple ...”