Terry Eagleton

There is plenty of stuff to keep Pseuds’ Corner busy for a fair few months: ‘Francesca’s fanny was a glorious irrepressible Afro pompon (“to go with my Botswana bottom”)’ might do for a start. A woman’s breasts move as she walks in a pattern ‘simple but somehow contradictory. As a drop of water fattens, stretches, shrinks: undecided in the suspense of its own elastic eternity.’ As with many Raine conceits, it is the voulu, blatantly unfelt quality of this that leaps from the page, the way it keeps a proud eye on its own verbal pirouetting.

In pre-Romantic times, a treatise on the mollusc or the optic nerve would have been considered part of literature. In the post-Romantic era, literature has looked on science with a much more sceptical eye. Once the arts come to achieve a monopoly on the imagination, so that ‘imaginative literature’ means poetry and drama rather than history or psychology, scientists like...

David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own...

It would be surprising if millions of ordinary people turned out to be familiar with the Platonic Forms or Spinoza’s doctrine of nature, yet millions of waiters, nurses and truck drivers have a working knowledge of Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident. This is because they are Roman Catholics, and the Council of Trent drew on Aristotle’s teaching to account...

One of the many things that Adorno admired about Beckett’s writing was its ‘scrupulous meanness’, to borrow Joyce’s description of his own literary style in Dubliners. Beckett’s works take a few sparse elements and permutate them with Irish-scholastic ingenuity into slightly altered patterns. Complete dramas are conjured out of reshuffled arrangements of the same...