Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by David Daiches
- One Literature and Politics
- Two The Political in Britain’s Two National Theatres
- Three Young Writers of the Thirties
- Four Koestler’s Koestler
- Five Hannah Arendt: Hedgehog or Fox?
- Six Beatrice Webb as English Diarist
- Seven Words
- Eight My Lse
- Nine Reading The Observer as a Complex Text
- Ten On the Difficulties of Writing Biography and of Orwell’s in Particular
- Eleven Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four As Satire
- Twelve Animal Farm For Schools
- Thirteen Orwell and English Socialism
- Fourteen On the Orwell Trail
- Fifteen Wedekind’s Spring Awakening
- Sixteen Horvath’s Tales From the Vienna Woods
- Seventeen Pinter’s No Man's Land
- Eighteen Polly By Gaslight
- Nineteen Edgar Catches Jenkins’ Ear at the Barbican
- Twenty Barrault at the Barbican
- Index
Nine - Reading The Observer as a Complex Text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by David Daiches
- One Literature and Politics
- Two The Political in Britain’s Two National Theatres
- Three Young Writers of the Thirties
- Four Koestler’s Koestler
- Five Hannah Arendt: Hedgehog or Fox?
- Six Beatrice Webb as English Diarist
- Seven Words
- Eight My Lse
- Nine Reading The Observer as a Complex Text
- Ten On the Difficulties of Writing Biography and of Orwell’s in Particular
- Eleven Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four As Satire
- Twelve Animal Farm For Schools
- Thirteen Orwell and English Socialism
- Fourteen On the Orwell Trail
- Fifteen Wedekind’s Spring Awakening
- Sixteen Horvath’s Tales From the Vienna Woods
- Seventeen Pinter’s No Man's Land
- Eighteen Polly By Gaslight
- Nineteen Edgar Catches Jenkins’ Ear at the Barbican
- Twenty Barrault at the Barbican
- Index
Summary
‘I have spent a most dismal day, first in going to church, then in reading the Sunday Times which grows duller and duller… then in reading through the rough draft of my novel which depresses me horribly. I really don't know which is the more stinking, the Sunday Times or the Observer. I go from one to the other like an invalid turing from side to side in bed and getting no comfort whichever way he turns.
(From a letter of Eric Blair written on a Sunday in 1932)In the October 1984 issue of this journal, Hugo Young began this occasional series on newspapers with a most interesting inside account of the internal politics of the Sunday Times, the struggle for control between owner and editor and its changing policies. All this could be done for the Observer, indeed. But I want to essay something simple but rare and difficult, to read the newspaper as a product, to read it closely and externally as an entire and self- contained text. The proof of the pudding is in the eating—as our mothers taught us before the colour supplements’ cookery inserts: just for once to look at the thing in itself and not how it came to be, or what it should be doing. And to look at it in its entirety. Hugo Young created the impression that the Sunday Times is composed of political matter! Did he ever read the whole astonishing artefact?
My quotation from Orwell is a little self-indulgent and external to the text, but it does serve to bring out two basic structural factors. The first is that for most educated, thoughtful, lively and well- informed people, there is only the choice of the one Sunday or the other—or both.1 No wonder that, hunting for the same market, the two rivals look so like each other, embodying the same kind of ‘improving consensus’ as the two main political parties used to do in pre-Thatcher days—and for much the same reason. ‘Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee’, it was often said, which still lookslargely true, by content, make-up and values, apart from the Sunday Times’ lurch to the Thatcher camp in its few political pages.
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- Essays on Politics and Literature , pp. 106 - 116Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020