“... ourselves, and if the mirror is enough of a caricature – not ridiculous, but touching – it may even happen that we prefer the animal to the human being. The fact is that in some respects some animals are even more human than human beings themselves. No human being has such an entreating expression as a basset hound, no human being is as loyal as his ...”

“... groups), which touches something of a nadir with its opposition to the student rebellion of May 1968. As these writers see it, then, the Seventies are characterised by a rapid decomposition of the Left. I think Khilnani is quite right to identify the signing of the Common Programme of the Left, in 1972, as the crucial moment at which a whole range of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... succeeded when the Bangladesh Government issued her a new passport in late April 1994. In early May, she flew to Paris for a human rights conference, stopping in Calcutta on her way home. There she gave an interview to a reporter for the English-language daily, the Statesman. The interview, published on 9 May, quoted her ...”

“... to psychoanalytic theory, but does not hesitate to declare its shortcomings. The Dreaming Brain may be seen as an attempt, generally successful, to supplant the analysis of dreams that lies at the core of psychoanalytic theory with a radically different neurophysiological vision, a central challenge to the scientific and psychological foundations of the ...”

“... there had been a Patristic revival in France around 1800; I don’t know whether this is true; he may have been thinking of Migne, though he was a bit later. He now projected many more books than he ever had time to write – for example, a book on Eliot and, simultaneously, two on popular culture. These last were boiled down by 1951 into one book, The ...”

“... who commended it to the King, and some of its polished repartee, as Winn and others have said, may owe something to Rochester. But the song, though as good as Rochester, isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written ...”

“... 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 ...”