Sunday, 8 January 2023

Disturbing imponderables like 'character', 'pure luck', 'ability to mix', and 'boldness' have a way of tipping the scales

[the scholarship boy] is unhappy in a society which presets largely a picture of disorder which is huge and sprawling, not limited, ordered, and centrally heated; in which the toffee-apples are not accurately given to those who work hardest nor even to the most intelligent; but in which disturbing imponderables like 'character', 'pure luck', 'ability to mix', and 'boldness'  have a way of tipping the scales. 

R. Hoggart, The uses of literacy (1957), 270

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