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“... of his more recent defenders, among them the historian Olivier Zunz and the political theorist Jeremy Jennings, present Tocqueville instead as a thinker who accepted the demise of feudalism, and who went further than most in making sense of the society emerging from the ruins. This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of ...”

“... quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have fun at the expense of Farage and Co. And so they do. But the impression an audience comes away with is that actually nothing much matters and that these ...”

“... care. Showbiz dies hard and in these toothless stand-up days I think Peter might just have liked Jeremy Hardy but would have drawn the line at Stewart Lee. 19 July. Depressed by the latest government privatisation as the NHS-owned company supplying safe blood plasma is sold off to a US firm which is ultimately owned by Mitt Romney and so likely to be ...”

“... I’m not a member of the Labour Party and so can’t vote. If I could, though, I’d vote for Jeremy Corbyn if only out of hope, the hope that the better part of salvation lies not in electoral calculation but in people’s aspirations.15 August. Rain stops me doing my usual half-hour cycle ride in Regent’s Park and when I do go later on it’s so busy ...”

“... culture to a summit of influence in the mid-20th century.’ Yet Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook don’t mention sport at all in A World Still to Win, their eloquent but also irritating and unconvincing tract on the ‘reconstruction of the post-war working class’. For them, it seems, the working class must be downtrodden, duped, or both at ...”

“... phrase. Local authorities have been starved of funds and legally emasculated. The BBC, which Ivor Jennings called one of the pillars of the British constitution, is now threatened with the loss of the licence fee and a demotion that would leave it as just another subscription-based network. It’s hard to exaggerate the irrational loathing of the BBC among ...”

“... is apt to picture every form of mass consumption as degenerate. Here – as in the writings of Jeremy Seabrook – it is the prosperity of the working class, rather than, or as well as, the poverty, which is the focus of anxiety. In any of these literatures, the North of England is apt to fare badly. As the original home of many of this country’s staple ...”

“... Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s ...”

“... and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy ...”