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  Labor & Labour  ·  Labour Party (GB) I  ·  Labour Party (GB) II  ·  Ladder  ·  Lady  ·  Lake & Lake Monsters  ·  Land  ·  Language  ·  Laos  ·  Las Vegas  ·  Last Words  ·  Latin  ·  Laugh & Laughter  ·  Law & Lawyer (I)  ·  Law & Lawyer (II)  ·  Laws of Physics & Science  ·  Lazy & Laziness  ·  Leader & Leadership  ·  Learner & Learning  ·  Lebanon & Lebanese  ·  Lecture & Lecturer  ·  Left Wing  ·  Leg  ·  Leisure  ·  Lend & Lender & Lending  ·  Leprosy  ·  Lesbian & Lesbianism  ·  Letter  ·  Ley Lines  ·  Libel  ·  Liberal & Liberal Party  ·  Liberia  ·  Liberty  ·  Library  ·  Libya & Libyans  ·  Lies & Liar (I)  ·  Lies & Liar (II)  ·  Life & Search For Life (I)  ·  Life & Search For Life (II)  ·  Life After Death  ·  Life's Like That (I)  ·  Life's Like That (II)  ·  Life's Like That (III)  ·  Light  ·  Lightning & Ball Lightning  ·  Like  ·  Limericks  ·  Lincoln, Abraham  ·  Lion  ·  Listen & Listener  ·  Literature  ·  Little  ·  Liverpool  ·  Loan  ·  Local & Civic Government  ·  Loch Ness Monster  ·  Lockerbie Bombing  ·  Logic  ·  London (I)  ·  London (II)  ·  London (III)  ·  Lonely & Loneliness  ·  Look  ·  Lord  ·  Los Angeles  ·  Lose & Loss & Lost  ·  Lot (Bible)  ·  Lottery  ·  Louisiana  ·  Love & Lover  ·  Loyalty  ·  LSD & Acid  ·  Lucifer  ·  Luck & Lucky  ·  Luke (Bible)  ·  Lunacy & Lunatic  ·  Lunar Society  ·  Lunch  ·  Lungs  ·  Lust  ·  Luxury  

★ Literature

Steinbeck toured the labour camps.  ibid.

 

Cannery Row, with its celebration of life in all its forms, is up there with The Grapes of Wrath.  ibid. 

 

East of Eden: it was a hugely ambitious undertaking.  ibid.

 

What they can’t deny Steinbeck is his power as a story-teller.  ibid.

 

He was also ahead of his time in developing an ecological view of man’s place in the universe.  ibid.

 

 

Bede was not just the founding father of English history, arguably he was also the first consummate story teller in all of English literature.  Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Beginnings, BBC 2000

 

 

[Elizabeth] Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city, the gin-palaces and open sewers.  Dark reeking alleys where skin-and-bones children played amongst the rats.  Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Victoria and Her Sisters

 

 

You may think our modern world was born yesterday.  But it wasn’t, not even the day before yesterday.  Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power.  The raw passion of national belonging.  Good and bad.  Our obsession with the self and our own psychology and the dark recesses of the human mind.  Even our love of nature, our concern for the future of the planet, all of this was the creation of the Romantics: a generation of artists living and working two hundred years ago around the time of the French revolution.  Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change.  And it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then.  The Romantics & Us with Simon Schama, BBC 2020

 

The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly, and many of them died young.  ibid. 

 

If you’ve ever been on a march for whatever cause, you’ve experienced one of the great inventions the Romantics brought into the modern world … A new religion of insurrection and agitation in which everyone can take to the streets to fight for freedom, equality and justice.  ibid. 

 

Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix: It’s been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since … Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions in which the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of liberty, equality and the rights of man.  ibid.

 

Delacroix’s image had its most famous resurrection during the Paris Uprisings of 1968 when students and workers came together on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism of French society under [Charles] de Gaulle.  ibid.  

 

The students took over the most prestigious art school and covered Paris in revolutionary slogans, poetry and street art.  ibid.

 

William Blake: His head swam with visions.  As he walked through the streets of his city he saw angels in the trees and amongst the haymakers in the fields.  He was always reaching for that bit of heaven and he sees everyone as potentially wonderful.  ibid.    

 

Perhaps the most surprising or at least the bravest was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.  In 1792, fired up by the revolution, Mary had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women … And so she arrived in Paris.  ibid.    

 

Over the next two years Mary witnessed the worst excesses of the Jacobean government.  ibid.   

 

You could see how the will of the people and the language of liberty became increasingly debased into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power.  ibid.

 

In 1811 while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series of anonymous texts in defence of atheism and the freedom of the press.  ibid.

 

He gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16 year old.  ibid.

 

Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy (1819): ‘As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me, To walk in the visions of Poesy.’  ibid.

 

 

Romanticism was born looking for trouble.  Some airy change in taste: what many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world by revolution if it came to it.  But what happened … when the romance of revolution ended in political failure and bloody disenchantment?  The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama II: The Chambers of the Mind   

 

Long before the invention of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers of the darker deeper regions of the human mind.  ibid.   

 

We go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world of the creative mind … Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams assisted by opium that our true self was revealed to us.  ibid.

 

 

It gets you every time doesn’t it … It was the Romantics who gave us this intense passion for the nation.  Who in their poetry, music and art transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth into something bigger and deeper  the secular devotion of national belonging.  Simon Schama, The Romantics & Us III: Tribes

 

Nationalism is above all the emotion of longing to go back or stay where you came from.  ibid.

 

 

A literacy revolution.  Adam Nicholson, The Century that Wrote Itself I: The Written Self, BBC 2013

 

 

But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ... Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.  That is all.  Oscar Wilde

 

 

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.  Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p5

 

 

A slightly tall angular shy but not unconfident Englishman with a hollow cheek look, a rather dolorous look in some ways, a solemn look, but yet it’s not the look of someone with no sense of humour.  It’s the look of someone who’s been through quite a lot and has tried his best.  But there is a final element of pessimism to it.  Christopher Hitchens, lecture Commonwealth Club 1991, ‘Why Orwell Matters’

 

He was facing that policeman in himself.  ibid.

 

The bullet had gone right through.  It had missed his  [George Orwell] larynx, it had missed his carotid artery, it had missed his spinal chord, and it only grazed his vocal chords.  And all of them said the same thing.  Can you guess what it was?  That was lucky.  And he said, If I was lucky, I wouldn’t have got shot in the throat at all.  ibid. 

 

He [George Orwell] exposed once and for all time the idea of the Stalinist utopia.  ibid.  

 

 

As the modern world began to take shape it would be that dark side of Gothic which fed on anxiety and alienation – all the bad stuff – that really came into its own.  Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour 2/3: The City and the Soul, BBC 2014  

 

Mary Shelley: a novel about progress and the dangers that come with it that still sends a shiver up the spine today ... Frankenstein.  ibid.

 

According to Blake art was the tree of life, science was the tree of death.  ibid.

 

They were nicknamed Penny Dreadfuls, and they were popular because they tapped into working class fears about the modern city.  ibid.

 

‘These ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers where the rain drips in and comes and goes fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint.’  ibid.  Dickens’ Bleak House

 

 

‘The red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound.’  Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour 3/3: Blood for Sale: Gothic Goes Global, Bram Stoker’s Dracula

 

‘My revenge is just begun.  I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.’  ibid.

 

In the world of the Gothic all roads lead to Dracula.  ibid.

 

 

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly though the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quick enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

 

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.  At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.  It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.  Winston made for the stairs.  George Orwell, 1984 p1 1949

 

 

Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an ‘eternal charm’, even though the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know that it will remain ‘eternally’ charming, since history has not yet ended?  Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge.  One result might be that we stopped enjoying them.  We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama might cease to speak at all significantly to us.

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