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“... reminiscence and regret to hostility and outright Schadenfreude – there was still no consensus. Francis Mulhern, who now attempts to tell the whole story of that journal for the first time, announces: ‘The true measure of the problem is that, 25 years after its closure, and 15 after its triumphant reissue, there exists not a single systematic ...”

“... it didn’t appear to include, nothing it didn’t appear to explain – until it had become (both Francis Mulhern and Kuper use the word) ‘everything’. Each of their books, one coming from literary studies, the other from anthropology, offers evidence that the concept of culture is itself experiencing a version of Alfred Kroeber’s explanation for ...”

“... shared with the Leavises the founding of Scrutiny. ‘The high period of the journal,’ says Francis Mulhern in his book The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, ‘was that commanded by F.R. Leavis 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 ...”

“... inertia and recalcitrance, not from the fall of the leaf. Post-Modern and historicist thought, as Francis Mulhern has pointed out, tends to reduce history to change; but ‘history is also – decisively, for its greater part – continuity.’ Nothing is more persistent than the idea of ephemerality, as this book demonstrates without being quite aware ...”

“... more moralistic, more puritanical contribution. In an informative introduction to Debray’s book, Francis Mulhern compares Debray’s work with that of the Leavises and of the Frankfurt School. For me, such a comparison can only be to Debray’s detriment. Q.D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, though polemical in intent, was a masterly piece of ...”

“... and Letters (1979), a big book of specific questions posed by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, members of the editorial committee of New Left Review; and of answers, rarely as specific or pointed, offered by Williams. The second section of Politics and Letters includes detailed criticism of The Long Revolution and Williams’s ...”

“... it a strong period flavour. Understandably, the modern New Left is keen to disown him. In 1979, Francis Mulhern wrote a book analysing the hazy and non-radical politics of Scrutiny. Stuart Hall, in Philip French’s programme, speaks of the ‘conservative critical model’ which Leavis and others of the Twenties and Thirties favoured. It is fair to ...”