Christopher Hilliard teaches British history at the University of Sydney. He is working on a book about the Littlehampton letters libel case of the 1920s.
Richard Hoggart made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor part of Leeds to grammar school and on to university, Hoggart never really made what the novelist Storm Jameson, a generation ahead of him at the University of Leeds, called the ‘journey from the...
Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on possible obscenity cases, was once asked by a colleague how he decided what advice to give. ‘I don’t know anything...
The story reveals the extent to which British society in the 1920s clung to certain beliefs about women and language. One of these prejudices, fiercely held, was that a ‘respectable’ woman was incapable...
Leavis bequeathed a confidence in the essential value of any intelligent reader’s intense engagement with the best literature.
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