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“... criticism nowadays knows that the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected – for instance, in the case of Huckleberry Finn – of masking a racist bias. Booth does not admit a racist bias in the invoking of academic norms, but he is convinced that the peremptory dismissal of Moses’ challenge to a canonical work ...”

“... shames more academic approaches. Such practitioners’ confessions, as Milan Kundera calls them, may be more partial but they’re also more impassioned. They know what it is like, and they know what they want. It is Henry James, of course, who exhibits at the highest level the combination of the practising novelist’s experience and the finest critical ...”

“... be regarded as a kind of novel. Any narrative is necessarily incomplete, and the details left out may for some readers be the important ones – what is taken for granted may become the crucial question. Such is the justification for the title. The chief theme of the book, or source for its examples, is the Gospel of St ...”

“... Their canons are of course so called only by loose analogy with the Biblical canons, so it may be of more than strictly clerical interest that there is a major row going on among the professionals who deal with the real thing. This powerfully written book by James Barr is for the most part a polemic against a new wave of Biblical criticism called by ...”

“... number, sitting on porches, leaning against gates or laid out in store windows. These techniques may or may not work for the forgetful majority of us; may or may not illuminate the structure of the brain or of cognition; but certainly show the way we ...”

“... pine suffered the same fate. Nevertheless, it seems that Kew still has specimens of which it may be possible to say that their cones cannot disperse their seeds without help from a forest fire. In any case the idea struck the poet as worthy of remark, both as calling to mind the fate of Semele, who conceived Bacchus when impregnated by Zeus in his full ...”

“... organs include the tail gland, which smells of violets (tail-swishing on social occasions may be a scent-spreading move), anal sacs which contain an acrid-smelling milky fluid, and scent glands between the toes. Scents which tell where the fox has been and bring the hounds on may keep foreign foxes off. Smells ...”

“... of contemporary literary criticism, Geoffrey Strickland’s quiet ‘thoughts on how we read’ may not have got a fair hearing. His book is an answer to the philosophical critics who have lately been questioning the assumption that literary and other texts have determinate meanings, meanings more or less under the control of their authors. Not that doubts ...”

“... and a reader who wants detailed accounts of Ptolemy’s Syntaxis or Epictetus’s Manual may find them elsewhere. Not, however, in the Cambridge History. And here a critic may find room to carp. In at least two respects the book is conservative. Literary scholars prefer poetry to prose, and they prefer the ...”

“... heavily pendulous upon the bough, are the fruits of research now offered to us (so very thick, we may say, has grown the ivy elegantly disposed on the present dust-jacket as on the last) that nothing of the kind need be supposed. Mrs Spurling must surely have been at work from the dawn of life, determined to know as much as God himself about Ivy’s ...”

“... forms of such control do not include voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide. A physician may not, in most jurisdictions, administer or prescribe for self-administration a lethal drug for the purpose of ending life, even at the explicit request of a fully competent patient. Yet a physician is legally permitted (sometimes legally required) to take ...”

“... general theory to the effect that demography, class struggle, national psychology or whatever it may be is the master key to the explanation of the whole long story. Michael Mann, however, deliberately places himself mid-way in-between. As a result, he risks being simultaneously attacked by one set of readers for writing potted history at a safe distance ...”

“... modernisation at bay, a bit of judicious restoration, or even nostalgic invention, of traditions may be called for. Accordingly, most neo-conservatives hark back to and even try to ‘improve’ on religious and other traditions. Others of them, who don’t find cultural restoration a plausible option, are led from a distaste for the modernisation of culture ...”

“... two remarkable thinkers meet again, then I hope – for the sake of any of the rest of us who may join them in Elysium (and none, I imagine, would want to join a club which did not admit these two as members) – that they will continue the debate. Maybe, when no longer threatened by a deadline, they will make a better job of it than Bateson does in Mind ...”

“... years ago demonstrates that even in Church politics you should never despair. The mills of God may grind slowly but they grind exceeding sure, or so those who fought for so long for the introduction of women priests into the poor old battered ecclesia anglicana may now feel entitled to claim. Why was the Anglican Church ...”