I posted a few days ago about somebody writing about class and social mobility and how it didn't entirely seem to reflect my own trajectory.
And this column I think is closer in several ways: I grew up in the era when the class escalator worked.
In particular, this: I more or less floated up my little gradient in the warm updraught provided by the ( Read more... )

There was a piece in yesterday's Observer by Lynsey Hanley based on her forthcoming book on her own experience in 'upward' social mobility.
Which made me think about my own trajectory and how there is not really just one story there, and that are some of those stresses just about moving away from one's family of origin and doing something outside ( Read more... )

Reading a review of that latest book by the Tiger Mother woman (and husband) -

a) These people have clearly never read any family saga novels, whether Buddenbrooks or The Crowthers of Bankdam, otherwise they might be a bit more aware of the 'clogs to clogs' narrative, or at least the 'third generation on from the striving upwardly mobile successful ( Read more... )

I'm just not sure exactly how talking about the history of syphilis stacks up on the scale of positive representations or of privilege.

Okay, so I'm not doing that meme that's going around at the moment because it's just so US-ocentric*, and so much directed at a generation much younger than mine, assuming an almost default status for phenomena ( Read more... )

Thanks to everybody who provided assistance in trying to discover the details of the story I was looking for - even if I still haven't managed to pin it down.

The context for me was writing up my commentator's notes from the January workshop in Cambridge as an afterword to the published papers. One of the subjects under discussion was the history ( Read more... )