The more things change....

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

To be a highbrow, with a footing in the snootier magazines, means delivering yourself over to horrible campaigns of wire-pulling and backstairs-crawling. In the highbrow world you 'get on', if you 'get on' at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.

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The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious- looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucus voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teatotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of nonconformity behind him, and above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.