“... him somewhere (I do not know how seriously) ‘a gifted pupil of Hodgskin’. All Marx’s ideas may indeed have been anticipated – all, that is, save the whole, the transforming synthesis. A contemporary scholar, no less learned than Professor Aarsleff, is reported to have remarked, ‘We do not need Hume,’ because all Hume’s notions could be ...”

“... In the present climate of polemical exchange one may doubt whether Gabriel Josipovici would take very kindly to being enlisted on the side of ‘literary theory’. Though his essays make reference to figures like Barthes and Derrida, they do so with an air of studied detachment, as if to forestall any charge of deeper complicity ...”

“... May 1915 saw the end of the last purely Liberal government in Britain. October 1964 saw the defeat of the last aristocrat to head a Conservative government by a Labour Party dedicated to regenerating the country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen ...”

“... the wholesale critique of our current literary, political and ideological consensus. This may seem to some, as it does to me, to want to have it both ways. Later on we shall find yet another instance of this bi-fold desire. But it does not prevent Norris’s book from raising a number of important questions. One word of caution. Philosophers, I ...”

“... so well-known a poem as ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height.’ The topic may seem reasonably familiar, but the sound of the poem is extraordinarily remote from the commonplace, and it is clearly part of the peculiar strength of Tennyson’s verse that it can propose such a topic in such a way as to subvert its plainness. Consider ...”

“... of the preceding observation – Marxists have devoted an inordinate interest to what we may call negative explananda – the events that could have occurred, but didn’t. Jacoby develops the idea of ‘class-unconsciousness’, which is said to be the ‘product of historical forces and institutions’. Gilbert observes, absurdly but ...”

“... decision-making often fail to grasp the complexity of judicial aims and the divergences that may exist between those aims and the myopic ends of the politicians for whom the judges probably vote. The judiciary may be reactionary, but it is not the Tory Party in horsehair, and it is eminently capable of biting the hand ...”

“... 15, In great payne; June 16, In paines alover; June 17, In great payne.’ And such mute ness may help to explain why many codes of conduct – Stoicism is the obvious example – have prescribed dignified silence as an assertion of brain over pain. Post-Holocaust conventional wisdom deemed that the most hideous pain – that caused by ...”

“... He’s the strongish, silent type who won’t complain if there are no croissants at breakfast. He may not succumb to the t-shirt, but he’s busy having been there, done that. He can be moved by a spectacular view at the end of a dreadful day. He believes that nothing should come easy, there must be endemic hassle and haggle from dawn to dusk. And because the ...”

“... his novel.’ Whether Chris’s novel is worth Rowland’s obsession with it is unclear. We may be tempted to discount Rowland’s conviction (driven as it is by self-tormenting jealous horror) that the book proves the boy’s literary mastery, but the narrator, omniscient and neutral to the point of slackness, seems to agree with Rowland’s ...”

“... but not made light of – such as the suggestion that Ricks’s enthusiasm for Little Gidding may be misplaced. It was Ricks’s defence of what he had called ‘the generous common humanity’ of the clichés in Little Gidding that Hill took particular objection to. ‘I would ask him,’ Hill riposted with some sting in Style and Faith, ‘to place his ...”

“... they aren’t usually allowed to use the same bathrooms and toilets as their employers). They may be poor relatives; or they may be adults from outside the family. They have no fixed hours, though in some cases they are given a day off every week or every fortnight. The government recognises their existence by providing ...”

“... at all. Proust himself could be more accommodating, and at one point implies that almost anything may be paradise if it keeps us out. The life of the Duchess of Guermantes, the narrator says, ‘appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter’. Scott Moncrieff, the earlier and best-known translator of Proust, is in this case quite literal about the ...”

“... The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 April, with the run-offs on 6 May – has moved matters along at a quicker pace than even ACLEFEU optimists could have hoped. The electoral register for the presidential elections, and for the elections to the National Assembly in June, closed at the end of last year. Since then the ...”

“... I take it, she means something like ‘unverifiable’, impossible to locate and scrutinise. It may be that she is asking here for more clarity than is necessary; as she knows, there are people who find psychological explanations useful, without doubting their own ultimate inscrutability. But by warning us away from an essentialist, psychological view of ...”