Daily Telegraph:
"Terry-Thomas, who died 25 years ago, was a man who makes today's rotters look an absolute shower"
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| Link to web site |
"To British cinema-goers of the Fifities and Sixties, he was as instantly recognisable as Kenneth Williams or Sid James. That gap-toothed smile. That scruffy moustache, like a slug on the upper lip. Those inimitable catch-phrases. 'You're an absolute shower.' 'Jolly good show.' 'Hard cheese.' That indefinable air of untrustworthiness...
"... He looked impressive. How could you not trust a man who was so immaculately turned out, from the gleaming shoes to the carnation in the button-hole? But you counted the spoons when he was gone. He was in the great English tradition of the non-gentleman posing as gentleman and coming within a whisker of pulling it off.
"... In a golden age for rotters – sharp-elbowed types in dodgy blazers, driving flash cars they could not afford – he was the rotter's rotter. There were a lot of Terry-Thomases in the 1950s. They had not had good wars but, if they played their cards right, insisted on being calling Major, and wore a regimental tie at the golf club, they could enjoy a certain cachet. They could bluff for Britain. Terry-Thomas caught their affectations and insecurities to a T."
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| Link to The Guardian |
"There are several metropolitan elites. But the same one still pulls the strings"
"... Shortly before he died in 1994, the American historian and moralist Christopher Lasch wrote an eloquent charge sheet against similar targets in his posthumously published book The Revolt of the Elites. He mainly described the United States, but his analysis illuminates many other parts of the world (including the land of Brexit) as well.
"What went wrong? Lasch: 'The general course of recent history no longer favours the levelling of social distinctions but runs more and more in the direction of a two-class society.' What he called the 'democratisation of abundance' – the expectation that each generation would be better off than its predecessor – was giving way to a society of rising inequalities.
How did this happen? When the idea that the masses were riding the wave of history faded away. The radical movements of the 20th century have failed, and the industrial working class, once the mainstay of the socialist movement, has been weakened to the point where, in some of its former strongholds, it barely exists anymore.
Who are the elites? 'Those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.'
"A Marxist could have written those last words; the Daily Mail, in its anti-Philip ('Sir Shifty') Green and anti-metropolitan moments, could almost have written it."
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