Independent

Griffith-Jones was visibly flummoxed. “I thought I had lived my life under a misapprehension as to the meaning of the world ‘puritanical,’” he said. “Will you help me?” “Yes,” said Hoggart kindly. “In England today and for a long time the word ‘puritanical’ has been extended to mean someone who is against anything which is pleasurable, particularly sex. The proper meaning of it, to a literary man or to a linguist, is somebody who belongs to the tradition of British Puritanism, generally, and the distinguishing feature of that is an intense sense of responsibility for one’s conscience. In that sense, the book is puritanical.”

How I wish that our modern Puritans were puritanical…