Love & Passion Quote by Simon Raven

There is a sly nostalgia baked into Raven's compliment, but it comes with a barb. Calling 1948 "civilized" for not policing sex or piety sounds like a toast to tolerance; the phrasing quietly implies that the speaker has since watched that tolerance curdle. The line works because it treats privacy not as a lofty right but as a baseline marker of sophistication: the mature society is the one that can avert its gaze.

Raven's "Nobody minded" is doing double duty. On the surface, it suggests permissiveness. Underneath, it hints at a social compact among the educated classes: discretion was the price of freedom. "In bed" and "God" are paired as twin arenas of moral surveillance, and Raven's choice to mention them together collapses the usual divide between sexual respectability and religious conformity. He's not praising liberation as much as he is praising indifference - the refusal to be scandalized.

The year matters. Postwar Britain was rebuilding, living under austerity, still organized by deference and class codes. The welfare state was being born; the empire was thinning; public life wanted stability. In that climate, a "civilized attitude" reads like a private, clubbable liberalism: whatever your vices or doubts, keep them from becoming a crusade. Raven, a novelist attuned to manners and hypocrisy, smuggles in a warning: when societies start "minding" again - legislating bedrooms, interrogating belief - they aren't getting more moral. They're getting less secure.