critics-from-the-united-kingdom

"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist. Lessing's initial creative roots lie in this ..."

"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that the communicants got watered-down from Boots the chemist in , over the border."

"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales ... He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womanizer — this I had always known about him ... He was also, interestingly enough, very much a sort of a disappointed writer ..."

"that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before Christianity awoke them to the consciousness of sin, of suffering, and of immortality."

"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."

"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , excuses for getting out of the (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. ... He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable."

"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute."

"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life."

"Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it."

"I know that what your city has done in the war that is past, it shall do again in the war that has already arrived and has still to be won in the future. It is an onerous responsibility. Yet it is a matter of personal pride and happiness that this responsibility is to be borne by the people of the city I first came to know during the war at the Combined Naval and Air Headquarters at Magee College and that I have visited regularly ever since. It is here, where fashion and fads are treated with amusement and contempt, here, in a society that is rooted in tradition and continuity, that one can have a sense of the links between the human struggle and the eternal verities. Without that abiding sense of continuity, men would become little better than the flies of a summer. With that as a treasured element of our patrimony, we become actors in a great drama, a story that ends in a world beyond our own and for which our own is an immense and glorious preparation. God is the goal of our history; our history is the preserve of the God-fearing, the brave, the chivalric, the courteous, the humble."

"[E]schatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present in every moment, the types always relevant."

"The Sense of an Ending" is a brief history of the paradigm and some of its variations. Kermode's book is an impressively learned, eloquent and brilliant defense of a non-schismatic view of human time. "At some very low level"- biological or psychological- "we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature." Man's position existentially is intermediary; he is born and dies "in the middle of things." What Kermode calls "fictions" (in both literature and the rest of life) are those "coherent patterns" which, by providing or implying an ending, "make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle." These temporal fictions "humanize the common death" and allow us to coexist with temporal chaos."

"We project ourselves–a small, humble, elect perhaps–past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle..."

"They [Millenarians] had, as Bultmann puts it, abolished history in favour of eschatology; but it was a premature abolition. Already in St. Paul and St. John there is a tendency to conceive of the End as happening at every moment; this is the moment when the modern concept of crisis was born - St. John puns on the Greek word, which means both 'judgment' and 'separation.' ...'In the sacramental church,' says Bultmann, 'eschatology is not abandoned but is neutralized in so far as the powers of the beyond are already working in the present.' No longer imminent, the End is immanent. So that it is not merely the remnant of time that has eschatological import; the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a benefaction from the End, now immanent."

"[A]lthough for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent."

"A politics of solidarity demands that my ally’s needs are my own."

"Agendas do not have to melt together or shed their distinctness or lose their efficacy when they “correspond or get along.” They do not have to align, at all. [...] There is no time, and there is so much work to be done."

"In the Neighing of an Horse, or in the growling of a Mastiff, there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, may I say, more humanity, than many time in the Tragical flights of Shakespear."

"Therefore Aristotle is always telling us that Poetry is σπουδαιότερον καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον, is more general and abstracted, is led more by the Philosophy, the reason and nature of things, than History: which only records things higley, piglety, right or wrong as they happen."

"Members of the Garrick Club, I beg you: do not surrender to the unsmiling commissars of the Cultural Revolution. They seek the elimination of you and your kind. Keep serving your awful offal. Beware, salad! Keep the ladies out and the Archibalds in."

""But Labour will be worse" no longer works as a bogeyman to scare the Tory tribe back into the polling booth. One wag described the choice between [[Rishi Sunak|[Rishi] Sunak]] and Sir Keir Starmer as, "Which Kray twin do you prefer?" Although one can't help feeling a little wistfully that, unlike Rishi and Keir, Reggie and Ronnie would at least have got a few things sorted in their forthright East End fashion."

"This is known as "victim shaming" now, but it is a true account of how young women felt about a famous, magnetic male who flattered them. And it would be more honest, perhaps, to admit that certain girls will always throw themselves at powerful, sexy, exploitative men."

"Yesterday morning, I was on a train to Liverpool to cover the trial when my editor called to break the news about the new guilty plea. My first reaction was anger. The reason I had set aside a predicted three-to-four weeks away from home, putting myself through what would undoubtedly be harrowing stories of maimed and dying primary-school children, was pretty straightforward: I wanted to bear witness. I wanted to get to the truth about what should, by rights, if this still calls itself a civilised society, be regarded as a notorious massacre. The heinous mass-murder of children with a carved knife – our nation has known nothing on that scale since Dunblane – in a respectable seaside town on the west coast of Lancashire merited a full public explanation."

"At Cop28, there are many who are convinced that we face a climate catastrophe in the next few decades if net zero is not delivered. Well, I say we are certain to have an economic and societal catastrophe if we persist in trying to reach that goal by 2050. Humanity cannot bear it."

"You know, I think Nigel Farage is already the leader of the Conservatives. He certainly makes a better, more convincing Tory than Rishi Sunak."

"We are already in Opposition, dear reader. Sorry to say. We are in Opposition against our own government, and have been for some time. It is sad and exhausting and dreadfully demoralising that it should have come to this, but here we are."

"I met Jeremy once on holiday and liked him enormously. Whatever he is full of, it's certainly not hate. (What Prince Harry and Meghan are full of is another matter.) Rather, he exudes a buoyant goodwill and a refusal to take things seriously that cheers everyone up. It has deservedly made him one of the most popular TV figures of our pious, finger-wagging age. You know, I would far rather have a world full of Jeremy Clarksons than Meghan Markles. I'm sure that things feel pretty serious for him right now, with the woke witchfinders at the door, but let's hope good times and high spirits return soon. We need him more than ever. Most people know that, for God’s sake."

"Are the females who fell for his weapons-grade flirting and lascivious quips, for that vampish slash of Kohl under the beady, greedy eyes, all victims of "emotional abuse"? Or did they possibly make really bad choices, as most of us have done at some point, ignoring the fact that the Shagger of the Year was unlikely to turn into Mr Darcy just because he pretended to take your phone number after you'd had sex with him in the hotel opposite his gig?"

"One thing you can be sure this embarrassingly useless inquiry will not be concluding is that our pandemic policy was devised and implemented by a group of spectrummy males, many of them physicists, mathematical modellers and behavioural psychologists who would struggle to pick out their own child in a school photograph."

"Just six months after she won her vote, [[Theresa May|[Theresa] May]] was forced out of office because people had cottoned onto the fact she was offering Brino (Brexit in name only). Johnson is a much better dissembler than May but, with slowly dawning horror, Tory voters have realised that the man who was once their hero is Cino – Conservative in name only. No wonder people are upset. We thought we were voting for Winston Churchill and we got the shifty offspring of Edward Heath and Greta Thunberg."

"Hope. Conservatives haven’t had hope for a very long time. Honestly, they would be mad not to choose Boris. No one else comes close. Can he start tomorrow, please?"

"For any Briton unburdened by snobbery, having a prime minister who was once a conjurer’s assistant would be pretty cool, actually. Besides, what better preparation for a Conservative leadership contest than having to maintain a fixed grin while a chap saws you in half?"

"Millions of people thought that when they put their cross in the Leave box, they were going to get Boris, whom they love. Michael Gove and his team had a better idea. They shafted Boris by pulling their support from his campaign with about 11 minutes to go. In strategic terms, this was like murdering a puppy on Christmas Day. Boris's surprise withdrawal may have looked like an admission of defeat, but it was actually a brilliant tactical move which left Gove standing next to the puppy corpse holding a carving knife. Boris declaring his support for the fantastic Andrea Leadsom, Gove's main Leave rival, pretty much guaranteed that if Boris wasn't going to get the top job, neither was Judas."

"If she doesn't take real, decisive action almost immediately, [[Liz Truss|[Liz] Truss]]'s honeymoon period could rival the reign of Lady Jane Grey for brevity."

"[T]hat moment when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom entered another party conference to Abba, dancing like a stork struck by lightning ... And still they didn't demand her resignation."

"What about the multiple charges against Boris – dreadful reputation, cavalier with detail – that were made during the questions at the end by BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg, speaking with clear distaste on behalf of the Chattering Classes? Just in time, the playful Boris millions know and love emerged from solemn statesmen mode to gently rib the sanctimonious Ms Kuenssberg. Out of “that great minestrone of observations", he told her encouragingly, he had picked up "one crouton, that I have been inconsistent". It was funny, yet, at the same time, it could not have been more serious. Boris was signalling that he won't modify either his language, or his behaviour, to please a politically correct, censorious liberal minority. He will express, in language most people understand, the ideas they hold dear. The metropolitan elite will damn him as a "populist", which is another word for a persuader and a winner. We like winners."

"What a great victory this is for Boris Johnson. Who else could have fought the people's corner so magnificently? Tied down like Gulliver in Lilliput with a hundred Parliamentary amendments; every which way he moved the buggers blocked him."

"This is the beginning of the end for the Remainers, but it's the start of something that could be extraordinary for Britain. Our Prime Minister already enjoys considerable affection, but he will be loved if he can pull off the trick of harnessing a post-Brexit economic boom to the vital cause of world-class public services."

"At first glance, the diverse candidates and supporters of the Brexit Party have little in common. What unites us, I suspect, is a sense that arrogant and unaccountable politicians in the capital have stopped making life better for the average family. Have stopped even caring. Through a combination of ineptitude and shortsightedness, and a maintenance of high immigration levels for the benefit of business, not local communities, politicians have murdered hope."

"One thing that both sides avoid mentioning is the fact that [[Russell Brand|[Russell] Brand]] was a hugely successful womaniser and his success was enabled by the girls who threw themselves at him in huge numbers."

"Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living."

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself."

"No cultural object can retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it."

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography or Das Kapital, a monetary value."

"The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot’s claim was that the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all."

"The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda – but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it."

"What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation:the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. WItness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures or rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact 'the' dominant styles, within the meainstream."

"It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms."

"This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of certain processes and services to marketization. (The supposed marketization of education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service or its product?) The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement."

"A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalism realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalism realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort."