“... The Elephant Man (1980), a still from which appears on the cover of the book. David Lynch’s film may indeed demonstrate ‘time-worn points of view’ in some ways, and its central figure may indeed combine the stereotypes of the Sweet Innocent and the Saintly Sage (Norden is inordinately fond of categories like these and ...”

“... Pope, who was soon venting his pique against ‘piddling Tibbald’ in The Dunciad, published in May 1728, and elsewhere. In this context of rivalry, the appearance of Double Falsehood seemed suspiciously convenient. What better way for Theobald to demonstrate his editorial expertise than to produce out of his hat a supposed lost play by the master? And ...”

“... be obliged to impose familiar patterns on the material, working according to inherited ideas which may well have eluded critical inspection. Only thus can he discern some sort of coherence in works that seem strange largely because they appear to have none. Historians are professionally prejudiced in favour of order; they cannot simply record chaos; sequences ...”

“... prefer criticism to literature – who find theory more useful and also (which older people may find hard to believe) easier than the texts; the latter, rather than justifying the theory, are justified (if at all) by their tenuous and contingent relation to it. Allowing that E.K. Chambers’s original Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse, frequently ...”

“... future betrayal softens his fury at die Boere. When he gets to Pretoria he can hardly bear it: May this earth be blighted! May locusts devour their jacaranda trees! May Loftus Versfeld Stadium be used for political rallies by the ANC! May the State ...”

“... be read in tandem with a lecture series spread over a university term or semester. Yet while there may have been perfectly good pragmatic (as well as commercial) motives for writing a new book on 19th-century art, the main reason put forward by Eisenman et al is the need for a critical (as opposed to empiricist/affirmative) survey of the period. That salient ...”

“... Say ‘Iain Banks’ and the person you are talking to will say ‘The Wasp Factory.’ Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty ...”

“... novels have been preoccupied with women who feel themselves to be profoundly separate. This may be the result of either choice or necessity, or of stoically making a choice of necessity. They are often tempted to alleviate this solitariness by falling in love with a man or attaching themselves to a couple or a family, but this usually ends in recoil and ...”

“... through an indefinite number of generations by what is really a form of artificial selection. This may sound an unpromising basis for exploring Darwinian evolution. However, partly because they mimic both the genetic and the developmental characteristics of organisms, biomorphs turn out to be spectacularly successful evolutionary material. Quite rapidly, the ...”

“... it can achieve some of its major economic objectives in the process. But the long-term outcome may very well be something that the Government does not anticipate, though I suspect it would not be unduly concerned if it did: a collapse in the maintenance of consent among the governed. If you start from the relatively uncontentious proposition that a ...”

“... Throw-away right at the heart of the Holy Grail theme in Ulysses. Yeats, on the other hand, may have been closer in spirit to a friend of mine who, in a poem about the Grand National which Foinavon won at 100/1, had the bookmakers going home in tears at such a big-priced winner, not realising that horses only run at big prices because no one backed ...”

“... more altruistic and noble than medicine? It comes as rather a scandalous suggestion that doctors may themselves be sick. Not just overworked and exhausted, and statistically liable to alcoholism, drug-dependence and suicide: but actually deficient in their psychological make-up. This shocking possibility has recently been floated by Glin Bennet, who argues ...”

“... You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing, undeniable, incommunicable experience we’ve all had. And yet for all its ubiquity, pain is a solitary encounter, a lonely way of discovering the certainty that you exist ...”

“... prolong our stay on the planet through physical survival and reproduction (and their refinements) may be the main priority, but recording our time here is pretty much what we do with our considerable spare brain capacity. Well, we have to do something with it, and it passes the time that would have passed anyway, but there are those, like Beckett and, it ...”

“... Discussing several different ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes: ‘one may, finally, see this phase of history in a European light’ – by implication, all other lights are somehow un-European – ‘and observe how many objective factors have combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united ...”