The amazing disappearing book review section: “In the age of market research, newspaper editors have

decreed that their readers just don’t care about books.” Salon And as literacy dwindles in the post-industrial West, it’s been assumed that the great working class masses had little use for

literature and intellectual pursuits in ages past either. A new book by Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, suggests that wasn’t the case. A century ago “the

working-class pursuit of education was not an accommodation to middle-class values, a capitulation to

bourgeois cultural hegemony. Instead, it represented the return of the repressed in a society where the

slogan ‘knowledge is power’ was passionately embraced by generations of working-class radicals who were

denied both.” The Telegraph (UK)