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“... It is, as Jeremy Seabrook says, the similarities that strike you first. There was a dull vacuity in his eyes nowadays; he became listless, hard of hearing, saying ‘Eh?’ when anybody asked him a question. Nothing to do with time; nothing to spend; nothing to do tomorrow nor the day after; nothing to wear; can’t get married ...”

“... a bit about mothers, most of it comes as less than a revelation. The book is an autobiography of Seabrook’s working-class childhood in Northampton during and just after the war. He was a twin, and the two boys were brought up by their mother, surrounded by aunts. His father, a feckless, flamboyant man, took off while they were still young. The implication ...”

“... has a certain period interest. This is the beginning of the end of that culture mourned by Jeremy Seabrook among others:                                       A landlord stares.All he has worked for is being destroyed.The slum rent-masters are at one with Pop.But there are obvious limitations to this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sentimental and moralistic pictures of working-class 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 ...”

“... aspirations are here to stay: on the other are the evangelists (exemplified by Jeremy Seabrook) who feel that the party can only regain its soul if its appeal becomes chiefly a moral, rather than an economic one, so as to re-arouse the sense of sharing the collective solidarity the old working class had. To the side of both these ...”

“... support armed conflicts; and the efforts to shout down and delegitimise those who don’t, such as Jeremy Corbyn – all these are signs of a country that has come to see military service, especially in wartime, as an extraordinary occupation, which should not be scrutinised too hard. Helen Parr’s book is, in part, an attempt to describe how this change came ...”

“... troubled, too, by urban encroachment on what’s left of rural livelihoods. He cites the work of Jeremy Seabrook on Penang fishermen, their homes cut off from the sea by a large highway and their fishing grounds polluted by the spread of urbanisation: the next generation ended up in Japanese-owned sweatshops. ‘In many cases,’ Davis ...”

“... the experience of fraternity, suffused with hope for a better future – the traditions of which Jeremy Seabrook writes so well and movingly. In Debts of Honour Michael Foot acknowledges his debt to lgnazio Silone, and quotes him revealingly: ‘I cannot conceive of Socialism tied to any particular theory, only to faith. The more Socialist theories ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... streets are all the same; nothing changes.’ More sharply, Carolyn Steedman also chal-challenges Jeremy Seabrook’s Working-Class Childhood, where a similar passivity is also the lost solidarity of the ‘old working class’, by contrast with post-war ‘materialism’, but which in the very form of its analysis ‘denies its subjects a particular ...”