What is "hotbeds"

Usage examples of "hotbeds".

Tansy especially, he was sure, had at first found everything nerveracking: the keen-honed faculty rivalries, the lip-service to all species of respectability, the bland requirement (which would have sent a simple mechanic into spasms) that faculty wives work for the college out of pure loyalty, the elaborate social responsibilities, and the endless chaperoning of resentfully fawning students (for Hempnell was one of those colleges which offer anxious parents an alternative to the unshepherded freedom of what Norman recalled a local politician having described as “those hotbeds of communism and free love”—the big metropolitan universities).

If there's this much underground activity on Firenze, then the universities should be hotbeds of subversion.

It was the city where the most active hotbeds of Communism outside the Iron Curtains tensely coexisted with the western U.