Stuart Harrison

“But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead.”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty: 'Bizarre and quite brilliant.' Dominic Sandbrook, host of THE REST IS HISTORY

“Britain has two competing traditions – one rooted in ideas of freedom, equality and democracy, and another that sees these words as mere rhetoric to be trotted out at will and violated whenever it serves the Machiavellian purposes of power preservation.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“Really it’s vanity to claim that land is your personal property. In a few hundred years you’ll be forgotten and the land will have shrugged you off as if nothing has happened.”
― John Higgs, Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past