“... If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to be said. Excised from the New Republic’s review of Macdonald’s collected essays, published in 1957 under the asking-for-it title of Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was a paragraph which put the case very deftly (the reviewer was Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the ...”

“... Albert held a bal costumé at Windsor in 1842, soon after they were married, and appeared as Edward III and his consort, Philippa of Hainault. They were painted in full medieval splendour by Edwin Landseer. The tradition later influenced society photographers – Madame Yevonde, Cecil Beaton – who encouraged fantasy play-acting in their ...”

“... is large and I suspect will soon give trouble’. Combe’s own amative region, he said, was small – he had not known the ‘wild freshness of morning’, even in his youth. Isabella’s bumps were against her: Love of Approbation and Adhesiveness were too big; Cautiousness and Veneration too small. For her too, there was trouble in ...”

“... on 14 October 1066. It is the final event that has dominated the public imagination. Since Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848), ‘last of’ has been almost obligatory in book titles, picked up by Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake, Last of the English (1866), and continued more recently in Hebe Weenolsen’s The ...”

“... in search of security. The fall of Stroessner’s dictatorship had been the downfall of order, he said. Banditen had made the roads dangerous even in daylight, people had been attacked in their houses. Unarmed pacifists in a land of guns, the Mennonites could not defend themselves and had to leave. Bolivia was fine, no bandits, no violence at all. For the ...”

“... as a criterion of moral health. ‘He was a moralist before he was a critic,’ Carey once said approvingly of Orwell, and the same might be said of him. In The Unexpected Professor, Carey described his youthful self as ‘dogmatically republican as well as socialist, edging on communist’, yet what mattered about ...”

“... Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted ...”

“... just as in heavy left circles he is in receipt of simple hatred. ‘A quiet well-spoken voice said: “You saw that we bunted down the paper store in South-East London [they had], and I just want to inform you that we’re going to burn down your office, burn down your home. You and your family are going to burn, you bastard.” ’ Later, outside the TUC ...”

“... for the library and another for the bedroom – party shoes v. slippers. As in the case of Edward Said, about whose bilingualism he has written perceptively, Kilito keeps touching and testing his daily experience of duality, and his thoughtful accounts of Arabic writers and tales deliver a most unusual fertility of ideas about what it means to ...”

“... and electronics took over from mechanical systems for data storage and typesetting, the same was said of computers. George Landow’s Hypertext is about one way of using computers to manipulate texts. He makes high claims for hypertext, a richly interconnected kind of database. ‘Critical theory,’ Landow writes, ‘promises to theorise hypertext and ...”

“... to restore Judaeo-Christian principles in the United States), the latter from an essay by Edward Said (first published in Critical Inquiry and reprinted in Hal Foster’s Postmodern Culture), but in both cases, Marty and other humanists are suspected of advancing a political and religious agenda under the guise of objective scientific ...”

“... self-expression, self-justification and self-explanation. Yet they did not give themselves away. Edward White Benson took charge of his five brothers and sisters at the age of 14, after the death of his father in 1842. This father had been an unsuccessful research chemist who had invested what money he had in a process for manufacturing white lead, but ...”

“... at the apartment where they lived. A woman came down and looked at us with suspicion. My father said he had lived here once. She was not impressed, only more cold.’ The woman explained, in her Austrian German, that, when she arrived after the war, his books had already gone. That Israeli daughter of Viennese exiles, Gaby Aldor, became an ...”

“... MacIntyre as Vico’s likeliest modern heir, assisted by Joyce, with a final helping hand from Edward Said. But Mali does not stay long enough with any of these to enable their ideas to assist in the systematic reconstruction of Vico’s own theory; nor is there a serious, sustained attempt to characterise his intellectual legacy. The one connecting ...”

“... the unassuming disclaimer that he ‘is not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan’. Edward Said would have explained it as a consequence of imperial power: British travellers and writers have been drawn to South and West Asia for the same reasons French ones ventured to North Africa and the Levant. To an extent, this is surely ...”