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Obsequy with teeth

The new statesman for reasons no less obscure than those governing the listener's choice of william roberts, caused sir herbert read to write " under pressure" some inconsequential recollections of meetings with lewis scarcely less barbed beneath their trimmings this "pressure," bursting outwards, gave vent in sir herbert to a mild sigh of relief that lewis could no longer menace sir herbert and all that sir herbert stands for. the extraordinary thing about lewis h that his critical talent was so potent that he transformed it from comment into creative art and this ability is of course the necessity of the satirist, but lewis could equally achieve this criticalcreative synthesis in painting which has no satirical intention, for his portraits have nothing of goya"s sardonic regard—the very quality one might have expected—but, held in equilibrium by his classical restraint, the best of his portraits exist in an order, possessed of an inherent logic, which defies the element of the grotesque necessary to satire.

Back to 1937

It was a measure of the depth of the gulfs in the society of the 1930's that he believed that the only kind of meaningful middle-class socialism was socialism through shared experience with the working classes, or rather the search for socialism through shared experience, for he believed that full sharing was impossible. class distinction to orwell expresses itself not so much in differences of income as in differences of manners and styles, whole ways of life, and as an exceptionally class-conscious product of the middle classes he recognised that "to abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself".

One New Town

This leads them to work out plans based on new neighbourhoods, multi-level corridor streets, mixed development, and social centres — all drawn from an outsider's view of cosy working class relationships which of course ' must not be disturbed ' or at least must be given a new form, a new significance. Housing estates (and, therefore we must suppose, the new towns) are now being attacked for not creating an environment which promotes the closeknit pattern of life which has been observed by sociologists, (notably michael young and peter wilmott — family and kinship in east london) in their studies of working-class communities.

Voice of Reason

Y e to e y e jon snow talks to denis healey about the gulf war voice of reason denis healey is a labour mp and a former defence secretary and chancellor of the exchequer denis, great atlanticist, a man with a vivid war experience, former defence secretary, it's an unlikely position to find you in over this war, isn't it? For instance, you find the chief of staff of the pakistani army, which has forces in saudi arabia, saying that the war was a zionist plot, and the moroccan government, which has troops in the gulf, supporting a general strike against the war.

Crete's Enigma

The female ancestors of this civilisation where women held great positions of power are the women of crete and greece today, whose strength and force probably stem directly from the amazonic and dynamic women of the minoan race. the war is still fresh in the minds of both greeks and cretans and this loyalty to the past, which at times can seem to border on obsession, is easier to understand if we note that the misery of the second world war was prolonged in greece by a civil war which continued to ravage the country until 1949.

Summer Of Discontent

if the public servant was once the victim of the public, the disasters transformed the target of collective calumny - we were all educated by the public inquiries in their wake: travellers were able to invoke their own experience, day after day, descending into the dungeons of london transport, to measure against the management's culpable negligence. for in london and the south east, the heartland of thatcherism, everyone except, it seems, the prime minister depends on public transport: personal experience every day vindicates the necessity of public-service transport, as much for the night cleaner in hackney as the civil servant in croydon.

Rocking The Racists

but raising your voice against apartheid is somehow qualitatively different from either band aid, kids aid, sport aid, ferry aid or farm aid. • agitpop june 11 sees the biggest array of pop stars since live aid, gathered together to celebrate nelson mandela's 70th birthday in an all-day concert at wembley stadium.

Lessons In Elitism

the curriculum consultation paper, for which a mere two months at the 'downgrading the mass of ordinary schools for ordinary people's children' comprehensive education: unpopular schools will be closed as a result of market forces height of the summer is allowed for response, is a typical product of a remote, managerially-inclined bureaucracy. government ministers are said (by an experienced observer) to have been 'startled by the passionate support for the state education and health services' voiced during the election; if the united voices of 'parents, churches, teachers and the local authorities can be mobilised in opposition to the education bill', writes maureen o'connor, positive results may be achieved (guardian, june 23, 1987).

Democrats' White Hopes

What panics the democratic establishment is that the synchronised march primaries - explicitly organised by the dlc to stop jackson and ensure the nomination of a white southerner - may backfire in jackson's favour as blacks vote in unprecedented numbers. Unlike lee iaccocca jackson: the only real opposition to reagan 3 marxism today august 1987  focus ('who wants to be president during a depression?'), the governor of new york has not given the definitive reason for his withdrawal and may be awaiting the mutual ruin of the other contenders to open a walk-on nomination next june.

YAMAL GAS PIPELINE

a more modest scheme was then devised whereby a loan of 8 billion dm would be made to cover the cost of imported equipment for a much simpler pipeline running yamal gas pipeline the construction is about to begin in the ussr of a natural gas pipeline stretching from the desolate wastes of western siberia to western europe. Called the yamal pipeline, after the yamal-nenetskii region where the ussr's (and the world's) largest gasfields are located, it will carry 40 billion cubic metres a year of gas from the giant urengoi field to west germany, france, italy and a number of other countries.

Culture and Society

Belching factory chimneys brought home more forcibly to philosophers that the times were changing, but they made by themselves no fundamental change in the structure of social relations; their smoke it may be added prevented many philosophers from noticing many other things that were now in the air. and ugly as the mills were, and bad in various worse ways, a lot of people hurried into them as soon as they began to spring up, glad of steadier work and better wages than they could get in the village; much as in our own day all the poor nations of the earth are to be seen pushing and jostling their way towards that ' industrialism' over whose gateway mr. williams's men of culture wrote their all hope abandon.  78 the new reasoner to be seen in the round, and understood in its real bearings, a pattern of ideas must be seen taking shape in the minds of members of a determinate social group in a specific epoch. Wordsworth's v. g. kiernan : culture and society 79 theory of diction was after all directed against the aristocratic culture of the pre-industrial 18th century, the culture of heroic couplet and man trap; and blake when he wrote of the harlot's curse and the soldier's blood was following a long humanitarian tradition of condemnation of things that were part and parcel of the old regime - evils among which the satanic mill made only one more, and which indeed were in part the reason why the mill was satanic.

Ode to Bartok

unutterable things - thought cannot form it, or speech reach down so far, eternally, utterly down, nothing but music, music like yours, bart6k, and yours, kodaly - music can pierce this night, your music, music expansive and fierce with the heat from the heart of the mineshaft - music endures, in visions of things to come when people will sing once more - music, the song 71  72 the new reasoner of this people, risen, reborn, so liberating our souls that the very walls of the prisons and camps are torn down, so fervent in inconoclastic prayer for our salvation, now, and here, in sacrifice so savage, so insane to salve us, that our wounds are stanched. order, but true order, lest the world perish o, if the world is not to perish the people must be free to speak, majestically!  70 the new reasoner gyula illyes : ode to bartok thin, wiry, dedicated musician, stern, true artist, true hungarian, (held, like so many of your generation under disapprobation,) was it not deep compulsion, this creating: that from the depth where the people's soul lay waiting, a darkened tomb that you alone can plumb, that out of this profound, from the long echoing chambers down, this mineshaft, from this narrow throat you could send forth the piercing note that rings to the outermost vault of the ordained, geometric concert-hall, the rounds and ranging tiers where remote suns are hung as chandeliers?

Exposes are very Square

brook is trying to feel his way towards a definition o f a new theatre, a theatre o f total reality that discards the “ lies” o f “ story, construction, technique, tempo, good curtains, effective moments, big scenes, climaxes” - lies which he calls “ time honoured forms” , but which are not forms at all, but conventions, our particular bastardization o f the well-made play, itself a bastardization o f a genuine dramatic form, the french eighteenth century rationalist drama. But our society presents both the domination o f our commercial theatre by a mechanical variation o f the wellmade play (a convention descended illegitimately from a form), and a proliferation and fragmentation o f con­ sciousness so extreme that no form can even begin to w h a t is really g o in g o n in g er m a n y ? wollen sie sich aus erster hand informieren ? dann lesen sie your refreshment rendezvous c arfax cafeteria cornmarket street and queens cafe 39-40 queen street p a r t y c a t e

Bevan by Claude Bourdet

consequently; at the very moment when frank cousins the new leader of the powerful transport union - as well as bevan’s own wife took up a violent position in favour of the renunciation by great britain of nuclear weapons; bevan preferred to pass with gaitskell a relatively honourable com­ promise; but which caused tremendous disappointment throughout the left in the party; demobilised the best militants; and provoked an estrangement between him and his most loyal friend, michael foot and “tribune”. Where do you stand ? 2 bevan claude bourdet a personality who aroused passionate feelings, about whom it was impossible to be indifferent; a unique figure in contemporary british politics: such is the judgment with which both friends is so important a phenomenon; linked simultaneously to personal and to more general factors; that it seems to me indispensable to analyse it now: this is, i think; the best homage one could render the ideal served by bevan and the memory of a man to whom we owe a lot.

Europe's Other Self

Stuart hall examines the impact of fundamentalism and third world migration on european identity as europe consolidates and converges, so a w e are advancing steadily towards two anniversary occasions for europe. the problem is (as colin prescod's excellent bbc2 series, black on europe, about the plight of western europe's ethnic minorities, has been showing) the 'barbarians' are already inside the gate; and face-to-face with them, european cosmopolitanism does not stand up well to the test.

View To A Kill

Increasingly we confront moral issues through the screen, and the screen confronts us with increasing numbers of moral dilemmas. Kevin robins questions the morality of our screen-gazing world w hat if we run the tape back and replay the gulf war after american psycho?

Are You Being Served?

The fact is that the relationship of a mental patient with a hospital is not the same as my relationship with waterstone's, any 28 more than my relationship with waterstone's is the same as my relationship with my doctor, or my child's school. it is in these terms that we find ourselves described in countless polytechnic mission statements and hospital business plans; it is as such that we are apologised to by british rail for the non-availability of buffets and the cancellation of trains; it is thus that the conservative party treasurer chooses to refer to what in happier times he might have called his 'members'1.

The End Of The Rainbow

it seems to me that coalition politics all too often takes the same form as class reductionism: it is assumed that the new social movements are essentially 'progressive', and that it is the task of socialists to lead each movement to its natural location in a coalition against the right. In class reductionism, it is likewise assumed that politics is basically a struggle between two camps, and that once we have correctly identified the class nature of every political actor, we can establish its location in the progressive or reactionary camps.

King Billy's Boys

the long black cars that lead the parade proper carry the venerable old who can no longer march the 10 or 12 miles to the ceremonial field and back: the cars carry orangemen great in years and honours, but never, ever, the old women who dance on swollen ankles and sing and wave their flags for king billy. then it was back to belfast to knock out another year's piece, through the littered, unceremonious streets, past the 20ft-high hessian screens the army trundle into place each year between catholic unity flats and the procession coming down the shankill road.

Phantoms At The Opera

These were not only from the excellent and innovative regional companies (scottish opera, welsh national opera, kent opera and opera north) but from small, independent groups in places such as scunthorpe, bromley and milton keynes. britain has a reputation for paying top musicians low rates - not just in opera - and may 1989  culture opera on tour from glasgow and liverpool to plymouth and southsea, britain's leading opera companies are appealing to new audiences with a range of new productions.

The Turning Green Tide

Since the end of the war, a stifling orthodoxy, born of the rigidities imposed at yalta and the emo- marxism today april 1989 'an alreadyhigh level of public sensitivity and expectation on the environment precedes political intervention'  tional scars on a generation of leaders whose formative experiences were of • war, has permeated and frequently paralysed european policy-making. It now encompasses the orthodox political parties of both left and right, the non-partisan pragmatists of the pressure groups, a significant and growing proportion of the mass of ordinary people and its own high priesthood in the greens and deeper greens who make up the activist membership of the new green parties.

BIRMINGHAM - Just Passing Through

And there's the rep and the art gallery clock and hansom's town hall - trust birmingham to get its town hall designed by the man who invented the taxi - and chamberlain's fountain and simon rattle's city of birmingham symphony orchestra play on. fortunately it isn't built yet so we are enjoying beautiful vistas while they flatten broad street: panoramic views of the gas street canal basin; wonderful jumbles of old and new, while watt and boulton and murdoch stand on their plinth and think on 'if i'd known it was going to come to this i wouldn't have boiled the kettle' - and the cranes tower above, still festooned with fairy lights and christmas trees.

Merseyside under the hammer

The political stalemate of labour or around for a little while longer and people, not surprisingly, would liberal in marginal control has been a continuing feature of liverpool welcome some attention to the problems of today, militant is fragile politics for the last decade. council house sales expected to run at 500 a year, the growing and so a political vacuum opened up in the labour party — to be proportion of the population drawing a low income from the dole can filled, in the absence of anything more coherent, by young socialists look forward to a very thin time.

review POLICING THE POLICE

The bi-monthly state research bulletin is a regular source of vital information about the work of the police and security agencies, and time out, new statesman and new society provide frequent outlets for reports by duncan campbell, rob rohrer, martin kettle and others who have monitored the use (and abuse) of increasing police power and the insidious politicisation of police forces. The first volume of policing the police, edited by peter hain last year, provided an extremely useful and thorough critical evaluation by derek humphery of the police act of 1976 (which instituted for the first time a form of independent review of complaints against the police), and of the 1974 and 1976 prevention of terrorism acts (by brian rosesmith).

The Crisis in Town Planning

Yet these towns within the city can remain an essential part of that city, provided of course communications with the city centre are fast and efficient. family housing of a slightly lower density (80 to the acre) can also be compactly planned and still have spaciousness, as has been proved by the elegant housing by architect eric lyons at ham common (bottom left), a rare example of speculative building which shows a healthy awareness of sound land use and twentieth century form.