“... rhetoric. I am not trying to underplay the practical, political and economic disasters that may face us, from what on earth will happen on the Irish border to where the Welsh farmers will sell their sheep. But we do need to attend also to the cheap, fruitless, repetitive and wordy stand-off we have descended to.On the one hand, there are those whose ...”

“... but a defence of the freedom of poets to write as, and what, they wish. No big problem, you may think. But suppose poetry was not the minority pursuit it has become in Britain today. Suppose it was the most popular form of entertainment available, the nearest equivalent to our mass media. That is not far from the truth about the world in which Plato ...”

“... a little doll has been stabbed to death, or drowned in the bath, or gassed by carbon monoxide; she may have hanged herself on the laundry line (or is it just supposed to look that way?), jumped or been pushed off a high balcony – or was she shot first? Frances Glessner Lee, a Gilded Age Chicago heiress whose family made a fortune in farm equipment, had no ...”

“... May I help you. No. In the mirror? No. Look there is still majesty, increase, sacrifice. Night in the flat pond. Moon in it/on it disposing entirely of mind. No. Look there is desert where there was grassland there is sun-inundation like a scrupulous meditation no message just mutter of immensity where it leaks into partiality ...”

“... or upstairs in Carl’s room, or by the stream that flows from the lime-trees into the Oder. May the past and the future sweeten your present, may you be happy as in a dream, until – well, who could spell it out? A long kiss on your lips. P.S. Greet your parents from me – tell me, why do I feel uneasy whenever I ...”

“... stationed overseas during the Second World War: ‘Gooood morning, Potsdam!’ Forgotten it may be, but Reveille has one of the all-time great soundtracks: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, proto rock’n’roller Ella Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed called Frank Sinatra. Even at the time, Sinatra’s ...”

“... of Selfhood’, that we no longer need a distinction between morality and prudence, one may seem to be encouraging immorality.* By way of defence, I shall argue here that these distinctions between absolutism and relativism, rationality and irrationality, morality and expediency, are obsolete and clumsy tools – remnants of a vocabulary which we ...”

“... in what was happening. The heightened images of tension and disruption in her poems of the 1940s may have had other sources too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal ...”

“... He was given a bonus for his tireless work on the campaign.At around this time, he got to know May Murray, who was then 19. She had been trained to sing and play the piano by her aunts, who were well known in Dublin’s musical circles. May’s father disapproved of John Stanislaus, and his mother disapproved of ...”

“... archives to unearth ‘Marx before Marxism’. But who is Marx after Marxism? Cold War reflexes may still make it difficult to reread the Manifesto with fresh eyes. But the world is no longer divided into lethally armed Marxist and anti-Marxist camps. Somnambulant cadres have ceased reciting the work as a secular catechism, while upright anti-Communists no ...”

“... experimentation on primates as part of research aimed at improving the treatment of Parkinson’s may be justified. But he argues that this is not the case for the majority of experiments on animals (he tells us that the scale of animal experimentation is unknown – although known to be vast – because most animals aren’t even counted; the US Animal ...”

“... his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be left out to achieve such a grand synthesis, or so disquieting a compromise.He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer ...”

“... about Ayrton Senna. The man addressing us paused, shook his head: ‘When I remember the first of May 1994 …’ Senna was a special case but the point remained that driving on the public road doesn’t prepare you for trying to handle one of these machines. I’m fairly certain I didn’t miss out on much by picking the F430 instead of a more expensive ...”

“... liberalism has stopped the clock of change – has put an end to history – is already waning. We may reflect that human rights themselves have played a sacrificial role in this process, for the demise of the regimes of Eastern Europe was accelerated by a megaphone rhetoric about human rights from states, including our own, with an embarrassing capacity for ...”

“... homosexuality of certain relationships between individuals of the same sex,’ he wrote, ‘may be denied by some persons ... Some males who are being regularly fellated by other males without, however, ever performing fellation themselves, may insist that they are exclusively heterosexual and that they have never ...”