Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
I won't tow the party line of doing 'girlie' yoga and cardio for physical transformations.
This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.
When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.
Ties of loyalty play an understandably important part in how most MPs interact with their own party and the supporters who have elected and sustained them in their careers. As I know personally it is the strain put on those ties which constitutes the most unpleasant aspect of being at variance with one's own party line.
My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.
The party line is that stocks historically have outperformed all other investment plans.
When I was in China, Mao was Chairman, and parents were terrified to tell their children anything that differed from the party line in case the children repeated it and endangered the whole family.
Working at GCHQ was a relatively easy, reliable job. As long as you always toe the 'party line', you are more or less guaranteed a job for life.
Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.
