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“... Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees his organisation’s ‘creative future’ as one of ‘Martini media … available when and where you want it, with content moving freely between different devices and platforms’. As well as the weekly ...”

“... editorial board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci ...”

“... of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that ...”

“... was correcting their existing taste rather than banning a writer they had not yet encountered. Christopher Hilliard’s English as a Vocation shows that applicants to Downing were expected already to have read large swathes of Shakespeare, 17th-century poetry, Romantic poetry and 19th-century fiction. Hilliard has dug up not only the entrance exams that ...”

“... be willing, at any rate, to concede that Ovett’s intransigence is defensive in intent (though Christopher Brasher of the Observer has sometimes come close to suggesting otherwise). It must be said that the press, and to a lesser extent television, have their problems when it comes to athletics. Not the least of the difficulties is that most discussions of ...”

“... a foothold in the establishment they were criticising: in the words of Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, these were not rebellious outsiders but ‘young men questioning a system they had been trained to lead’ and laughing at ‘the society that had reared them’.The four cast members of Beyond the Fringe soon decamped to New York, where the revue ...”

“... to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics. But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,* the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with ...”

“... obsessed with its own version of English continuity. As Cairns Craig has argued in Cencrastus, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson see class struggle as fundamental to English history, but conceive that history to be ‘shaped as an autonomous inner trajectory defined by the conflicts and the accommodations between ...”

“... not excluding Paradise Lost (the wonder is that it hasn’t already been filmed, with Emma Thompson as the narrator and Denzel Washington in the title-role). Meanwhile, Behn’s plays have attracted stars as expensive as Jeremy Irons and Christopher Reeve, and she herself, now conscripted to the cause of ...”

“... the trade-union struggles, or was brought about by the cataclysm of 1914-1918. Another article, by Christopher Howard, details the Labour Party’s failure in the 1920s to expand local organisation and mass membership. It was the familiar story of small dedicated groups whose exertions ‘bore no little resemblance to the labours of Sisyphus’, and ...”

“... the early graduates of Cambridge English, [D.W.] Harding, [L.C.] Knights, Q.D. Leavis and [Denys] Thompson – five authors who, in aggregate, wrote on virtually every topic that Scrutiny ever discussed. The second Scrutiny generation, led by [R.G.] Cox and Ford, was markedly more restricted in range.’ Ford and his like (according to Mulhern) worked through ...”

“... of poets – she and her husband, Wilfred Meynell, also nurtured the talent of the wayward Francis Thompson. Meynell found the meanings ‘crowded’ in Williams’s early poems; it’s a relief she was spared the later ones. With his taste for ritual and belonging, it’s something of a surprise that Williams didn’t join Meynell in the Catholic ...”

“... than the geographical, as he goes on to suggest. Was the October Revolution peripheral for Christopher Hill, who joined the Party in the mid-1930s, learned Russian – as Hobsbawm explains he never did – and wrote a book on Lenin? At all events, in spelling out what he takes to be the larger difference, of time rather than space, Hobsbawm offers ...”

“... he called at his house, he said: ‘Guys, what about launching a paper?’ We decided we would and Christopher Logue was deputed to go to what’s now the British Library to look into possible names. I’d said: ‘I’m totally opposed to traditional left names – “Workers’ this”, or “Socialist that”. The people who are coming into politics are not ...”

“... of a dissident news-sheet, the Reasoner, crudely stencilled, as Macleod says, but inspired by E.P. Thompson and his fellow historian John Saville. (I was a camp follower.) Its third issue argued that if all the Communist Parties had banded together against intervention, it might have been averted. We wrote a joint letter to the New Statesman to make our view ...”