"I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance. There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ... Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming's poison. ..."
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Historians from EnglandJournalists from EnglandBiographers from EnglandEditors from EnglandPeople from Manchester
Original Language: English
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"Sex, snobbery and sadism" New Statesman (5 April 1958), as reproduced in Stephen Howe (ed) Lines of Dissent: Writings from the New Statesman (Verso, 1988) pp. 151-54
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Johnson
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Paul Johnson
Paul Bede Johnson (2 November 1928 – 12 January 2023) was an English journalist, historian, speechwriter and author.
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