Macdonald Daly

12.00 Home Front/A History of Ideas

This chapter analyses at length the BBC Radio 4 programmes ‘Home Front’ and ‘A History of Ideas’.

09.00 Round-Table Discussions and One-to-One Interviews

This chapter analyses at length the BBC Radio 4 programmes in the 9–9.45 a.m. timeslot, including ‘Start the Week’, ‘Midweek’ and ‘In Our Time’.

20.00–22.00 Miscellaneous Evening Programmes

This chapter analyses at length the BBC Radio 4 programmes in the 8.00–10.00 p.m. timeslots.

11.00 Morning Documentaries

This chapter analyses at length the BBC Radio 4 documentaries in the 11–11.30 a.m. timeslot.

11.30 Morning Comedies

This chapter analyses at length the BBC Radio 4 comedies in the 11.30 a.m.–12 noon timeslot.

Marx, Engels and early Marxist criticism

This chapter describes the authors of England, who were all literary critics. Some of them include: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. Carlyle started as a literary critic and translator, but became a social critic and historian. German literature was little read in England, with the one exception of Goethes Werther. Ruskin was the most highly theoretical of Victorian critics, as shown in his masterwork, Modern Painters, which established a theory of Beauty. Its appeal and influence continued well into the twentieth century. In his social and cultural criticism Ruskin emphasized the social and personal costs of industrial production, on the labourer or artisan turned into a machine, and also on the middle-class consumer. The second group of nineteenth-century critics might be seen as a second generation: Pater, Morris and Shaw were all exposed to the earlier writers in their youths.

Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present@@@Scottish Women's Fiction, 1920s to 1960s: Journeys into Being

Discusses the individual language habits of many major poets of Scotland, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Murray, Hugh MacDiarmand, Violet Jacob, Robert Garioch, Alex Scott, and Tom Leonard. The text concludes with a discussion of more adventurous experiments by the younger generation.

Malice Aforethought: The Fictions of Ellis Sharp

Abstract On our last evening together, drinking whisky, and then more whisky, and then yet more, I have never forgotten how we came (whose idea was it—his or mine? I no longer remember) to open up his Thesaurus at random, selecting quite arbitrarily a single, humble word, and chuckling as our fingers promiscuously roamed back and forth across the pages, up and down, between and below, touching every inch and scrap, every glorious, throbbing vowel and consonant and crackling, pulsating fiery connotation, until at last, drenched in sweat, half-drunk, utterly fatigued by our endeavours, we tumbled into a wordless, innocent and dreamless sleep. Ah, what it is to bathe in language, to cavort there, unashamed, ecstatic, up to the very ceiling of ones mind in beauty and resonance, drifting and gliding amid the harmonic choruses, the plangent chords, hearing the sweet hum of pluralism, soaring across the dazzling ranges of multiplicity, then falling, falling, dizzy, satiated, drained and drowsy, soothed by exces...

What Labour could do about the tabloids

LABOUR’S CONTEMPT FOR the tabloids has possibly never been greater. But when it comes to what should be done about the papers which it finds so risible and odious, the party’s mind has certainly never been emptier. The policy vacuum over the tabloids was evident from Kinnock’s resignation speech of 13 April 1992, in which he acknowledged the relationship between most of the tabloids and the Tories as being simply &dquo;a fact of British political life&dquo;. He had, he said, hoped that &dquo;it would be possible this time to succeed in achieving change in spite of that.&dquo; In my opinion the &dquo;election by tabloid&dquo; argument was a convenient smokescreen for the failure of Labour’s policy review to secure the votes which might have put the party into power. However, even when it became the official party line last June Labour’s national executive committee endorsed a report identifying a &dquo;tabloid factor&dquo; which putatively lost Labour 381,000 votes the stark absence of any proposal on what kind of policy Labour should now adopt towards the tabloids was bewildering. Nor did anything more concrete emerge later in the year. The nearest we got to a comment on the issue from a member of the Shadow Cabinet was Robin Cook’s reply to a question on BBC 1’s Question Time on 17 September. Asked whether or not he thought royalty should survive in its present form after tabloid revelations about royal marital tensions, he answered: