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Orwellspeak

Julian Symons, 9 November 1989

The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St George’ Orwell 
by John Rodden.
Oxford, 478 pp., £22.50, October 1989, 0 19 503954 8
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... the questions imply answers by no means favourable to Orwell) was echoed or extended in Britain by Raymond Williams, who turned Orwell’s achievement on its head by postulating an early praiseworthy socialist militant who became in the last books a passive though still radical pessimist, and managed to combine the pessimism with ‘an accommodation to ...

‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit

Stefan Collini: Christopher Hitchens, Englishman, 23 January 2003

Orwell's Victory 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Allen Lane, 150 pp., £9.99, June 2002, 9780713995848
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... about it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing. Raymond Williams is taken behind the bike sheds for a particularly nasty going-over; repetition of another kind adds to the problem here, since the substance of this long section was first delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1999 (as the ...

Is It Glamorous?

David Simpson: Stefan Collini among the Intellectuals, 6 March 2008

Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 544 pp., £16.99, July 2005, 0 19 929105 5
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... world, Collini finds, was always smaller than we like to think; meanwhile, both the Americans and Raymond Aron have imagined Britain as the place where the intellectual can live a happy and well-rewarded life. Collini’s book ought to put a stop to such fantasies. Not least among the virtues of Absent Minds is that it spares us another extended account of ...

His Bonnet Akimbo

Patrick Wright: Hamish Henderson, 3 November 2011

Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. I: The Making of the Poet (1919-53) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 416 pp., £14.99, May 2009, 978 1 84697 132 7
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Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Vol. II: Poetry Becomes People (1954-2002) 
by Timothy Neat.
Polygon, 395 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 1 84697 063 4
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... modernist rigour to his Celtic romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered Henderson as ‘very loud-voiced, very insistently Scottish, and constantly singing’. During the two years he spent in Cambridge before the Second World War bore him off ...

Martial Art

Bruce Robbins: Pierre Bourdieu, 20 April 2006

Science of Science and Reflexivity 
by Pierre Bourdieu, translated by Richard Nice.
Polity, 168 pp., £14.99, September 2004, 9780745630601
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... well as to Bourdieu) to use the life to amend the theory. Perry Anderson has compared Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, another scholarship boy who turned into a social critic – and, however reluctantly, into a kind of social success. Surely there are further conclusions to be drawn from such stories – not least that lowly origins can themselves serve as ...

By the Width of a Street

Christopher Prendergast: Literary geography, 29 October 1998

An Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 
by Franco Moretti.
Verso, 206 pp., £16, August 1998, 1 85984 883 4
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... of the suburbs. The later novels attempt more complex ‘connections’ (a term taken over from Raymond Williams’s account of Dickens in The Country and the City), but again in the direction of simplification: usually a version of the family romance (the re-connecting of parents with long-lost children and so forth). What they offer is a sentimental ...

Watercress

Patrick Parrinder, 20 August 1992

Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History 
by Carolyn Steedman.
Rivers Oram, 224 pp., £22, June 1992, 1 85489 021 2
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... community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy and hospitable but lonely, introverted and largely joyless. Her mother, a Lancashire weaver’s daughter, had fought against marginality and deprivation by moving to London, becoming a ...

Jokes

Donald Davie, 11 June 1992

In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets 
by Peter Robinson.
Oxford, 260 pp., £35, May 1992, 0 19 811248 3
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... Thus his psychologist is Melanie Klein, not Julia Kristeva; and his philosopher is Bernard Williams, not you-know who. So, too, his prose at its worst recalls Raymond Williams, for whom, ideologically, he has no time. More pertinently, there are no jokes, or none that I can see. This gets to seem important as ...

Early Kermode

Stefan Collini, 13 August 2020

... giving final form to the book that became The Rise of the Novel, again published in 1957; and that Raymond Williams was drafting the bulk of what became Culture and Society, submitted to the publisher in 1956, eventually published in 1958. These were Frank’s contemporaries and peers: all had served during the war; all had non-Oxbridge teaching posts ...

Before Wapping

Asa Briggs, 22 May 1986

Victorian News and Newspapers 
by Lucy Brown.
Oxford, 305 pp., £32.50, November 1985, 0 19 822624 1
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... Is it the fear of spreading too widely? Among living writers she does not mention Richard Altick, Raymond Williams or Anthony Smith. Nor does she speculate about newspapers and books, which co-existed easily or sometimes uneasily on W.H. Smith bookstalls, although she has a brief and useful section on periodicals which steadfastly dealt in opinions. She ...

Aliens

John Sutherland, 21 January 1982

Brave Old World 
by Philippe Curval, translated by Steve Cox.
Allison and Busby, 262 pp., £6.95, November 1981, 0 85031 407 0
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The Insider 
by Christopher Evans.
Faber, 215 pp., £6.95, November 1981, 0 571 11774 0
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Genetha 
by Roy Heath.
Allison and Busby, 185 pp., £6.95, November 1981, 0 85031 410 0
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From the Heat of the Day 
by Roy Heath.
Allison and Busby, 159 pp., £6.50, October 1979, 0 85031 325 2
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One Generation 
by Roy Heath.
Allison and Busby, 202 pp., £2.50, March 1981, 9780850312546
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Sardines 
by Nuruddin Farah.
Allison and Busby, 250 pp., £7.95, November 1981, 0 85031 408 9
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... and ‘alien’ population? Invent a pessimistic dystopia. It is this dangerous facility that Raymond Williams refers to when he terms SF ‘liberated and promiscuous’. Its profundities are too painlessly arrived at. With Genetha, Roy Heath completes his Guyana trilogy following the fortunes of the Armstrong family to their dismal conclusion. The ...

Shop Talk

John Lennard, 27 January 1994

Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses 
by Walter Nash.
Blackwell, 214 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 9780631180630
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... one between the pudendum muliebre and the pons asinorum? Ambrose Bierce it ain’t, nor yet Raymond Williams, and too many of Nash’s definitions fall nastily flat between them; but some are very much better. Credentialism, or ‘the principle that a PhD goes farther than an MSc’, joins Virtual Reality (‘real toads in imaginary gardens’) and ...

Cockaigne

Frank Kermode, 24 October 1991

Orwell: The Authorised Biography 
by Michael Shelden.
Heinemann, 563 pp., £18.50, October 1991, 0 434 69517 3
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... was of ‘the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves’, and as Raymond Williams pointed out in his 1984 meditation on 1984, this conviction accounts for a lot that happens in the novel, where the tyrannical system concerns itself mostly with controlling the intellectual minority. ...

Plain English

Denis Donoghue, 20 December 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four: Facsimile Edition 
by George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison.
Secker, 291 pp., £25, July 1984, 9780436350221
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Nineteen Eighty-Four 
by George Orwell, edited by Bernard Crick.
Oxford, 460 pp., £17.50, March 1984, 0 19 818521 9
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Inside the Myth. Orwell: Views from the Left 
edited by Christopher Norris.
Lawrence and Wishart, 287 pp., £12.50, November 1984, 0 85315 599 2
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The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell 
by George Woodcock.
Fourth Estate, 287 pp., £5.95, November 1984, 0 947795 05 7
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Orwell’s London 
by John Thompson.
Fourth Estate, 119 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 947795 00 6
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... Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is this: Orwell, ostensibly a man of the Left, made his work available to the Cold War wretches on the Right. But the critics can’t make up their minds whether ...

No Escape

Bruce Robbins: Culture, 1 November 2001

Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress 
edited by Samuel Huntington and Lawrence Harrison.
Basic Books, 384 pp., £12.99, April 2001, 0 465 03176 5
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Culture/Metaculture 
by Francis Mulhern.
Routledge, 198 pp., £8.99, March 2000, 0 415 10230 8
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Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account 
by Adam Kuper.
Harvard, 299 pp., £12.50, November 2000, 0 674 00417 5
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... of Alfred Kroeber’s explanation for the abolition of taboos: cultural fatigue. According to Raymond Williams’s classic account, the notion of ‘culture’ (which was invented only at the end of the 18th century) achieved its influence and intellectual authority by setting itself up as a standard against which capitalist or industrial modernity ...

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