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“... If some test-tube baby of the future, or some creature born of spontaneous generation, wanted to know something about mothers, I might recommend Mother and Son for at least one view of that relationship. But for the rest of us, who already know 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 ...”

“... In Lost Children Polly Toynbee has, for reasons she never makes clear, interviewed many – she does not say how many – adopted children who, after the Children’s Act of 1975 was passed, set out in search of their biological parents. Her book presents us with nine ‘case-studies’ of children who searched for and found their parents, not always with happy results ...”

“... support. The Blairite cohort that dominates the Guardian’s opinion pages – Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toynbee et al – had zero impact on the result, desperate though they were to trash Corbyn. They were desperate enough even to give space – twice – to Blair himself, in the hope of rehabilitating him. Naturally, the paper lost many ...”

“... But if Aubenas says little else about it in her book, such qualms are addressed head-on by Polly Toynbee and Barbara Ehrenreich in their accounts of going undercover, Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain and Nickel and Dimed. Both of them insist that what they are attempting is not to experience in an authentic sense the lives of these workers but ...”

“... badly wrong) there is less agreement as to exactly what that something is. In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee, a loyalish, if increasingly exasperated supporter, sees the problem as ‘cowardice’: a party and government of basically progressive reformers, who have done many good things but are paralysed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon, and a ...”

“... it into the shade and into context, were the contributions of the Guardian’s big beasts, Polly Toynbee and Jonathan Freedland. Toynbee began by comprehensively misreading the moment, refusing to believe that party activists who had ‘heard what people said on the doorsteps’ about Miliband and the deficit ...”

“... to us – including the benefits to humankind which biotechnologists typically have in view. Polly Toynbee fails to note the irony when, in her Radio Times column, she first complains of the sentimentality of opponents of animal experiments and then invites us to reflect how we would feel if a girl’s life might have been saved through such ...”

“... Dacre enjoys fulminating against the machinations of the liberal elite, when all he means is that Polly Toynbee and Andrew Marr may have had dinner in the same North London restaurant as Jon Snow. He wishes to stir up populist disgust at the idea of a liberal, self-satisfied elite – nice, coming from the back of a chauffeur-driven car or from the ...”

“... colleagues were devastated, his enemies rejoiced. Two days later the Guardian published a piece by Polly Toynbee denouncing Waugh as one of the ‘reactionary fogeys’ whose icon was Evelyn Waugh. ‘Effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist’, he was a writer of ‘limited vocabulary’ whose work was ‘empty and destructive’. Eighteen ...”

“... into the Alliance, he still carried with him not only a posse of adoring women – Sue Slipman, Polly Toynbee and Rosie Barnes among them – but even such a seasoned campaigner as John Cartwright. One reads their names and wonders how true believers in Elmer Gantry felt when the charisma wore off.Crewe and King talk of the Gang of Four in almost ...”

“... Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are firmly out. Pauline Réage is not given the benefit of the gender doubt. There is a noticeable favouritism towards the French ...”

“... gets is of people awakening from a long sleep and wondering where they have been all this time. Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, put it well when she recounted how she walked into the CND offices to renew her long-lapsed subscription with the kind of embarrassment one might feel returning to the church of one’s youth. There, in the cramped ...”

“... keep sitting down, and with no warders on duty I’ll generally sit on their chairs. An article by Polly Toynbee in this morning’s Guardian explains why. Presumably as part of the sponsorship deal for the exhibition the wardering was outsourced so the first casualty was the warders’ chairs, and the warders’ comfort. (I’ve a feeling that the ...”

“... especially if, as is likely, they have paid attention to the discussion of recent studies such as Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards (2008) or Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level (2009).* But what should remain shocking is the way in which the officially endorsed language of ‘aspiration’ occludes the stark facts of ...”

“... but their fears of becoming the dupes of a sinister literary plot now seem exaggerated. Philip Toynbee, for example, who declared that he had never really been taken in for a minute, his scepticism having been awakened early on by the frontispiece (you can’t get much earlier in a book than its frontispiece), obviously had been taken in and felt let ...”