“... He is certainly correct to say that ornament has never found its home in aesthetic theory, and may be right in attributing this to ornament’s resistance to romantic notions of artistic creation and contemplation. Adolf Loos may have expressed something highly characteristic of modern thought, and not just of Modernist ...”

“... and non-Scottish currents; on the other hand, there is a danger that his echt Donnishness may be submerged. The Paterson obsessed with his Alexandrian library, trawling up books, odd facts and titles – the ‘informationist’ Paterson – belongs to a Scottish grouping and tradition whose ancestors include Carlyle’s Professor Teufels-dröckh and ...”

“... Guiana, and dominates operations like the attempted ‘destabilisation’ of Manley in Jamaica. It may be an MI6 man who is ambassador to Mauritius, close to the Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia. But the US calls the shots. The British have tried to plug the dyke of disclosures. They exerted heavy pressure on the United States not to let British material ...”

“... if not definitiveness to his thinking. The ideological components in Hume’s political thought may be taken – as Miller takes them – to start with ‘his conception of human nature, about which he held a view mid-way between the pessimism of, say, Hobbes and the optimism of, say, Rousseau or Godwin’. In Miller’s excellent phrase, the postulate is ...”

“... as might be expected, trace the origins of the condition to early childhood. The mother may have failed to help the child sort out and label feelings, or perhaps the father avoided the discussion of emotions. Alexithymics can sometimes be helped to establish good relationships by acting as though they had feelings. ‘They learn to infer what they ...”

“... of our marriage, Alvarez has cast me in a variety of roles, from Jungle Jane to Giant Sloth. It may come as a surprise to him to find me among his critics. Life after Marriage follows much the same pattern as his best-selling The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. The personal bit, the friends, the literary figures. A formula that was perhaps worthy of ...”

“... life chances provided by the economic, social and technical resources of a society. Institutions may be an adequate, in formal terms a flexible, open, response to these forces: if and as long as this is the case, there are not liable to be doubts in legitimacy [sic] to any considerable extent. It is, however, conceivable – and indeed at times inevitable ...”

“... to us of the poverty of Christ, and of the burdens of a life of pious poverty, in a way that may again seem a too obviously salutary reminder to the consciences of rich and poor alike. If this is an idea Gainsborough was trying out for a full-scale painting, it’s not very surprising that he rejected it: the sympathy of the polite was certainly open to ...”

“... being a grim reminder of the lengths to which violence was carried. But however non-paranoid one may in general be about the Police, one cannot but feel very uneasy both about some of the things that happened in the mining villages, and about the de facto creation during the strike of a national police force whose accountability to anyone was difficult to ...”

“... one, that he deserves better than to be regarded as merely one of Auden’s acolytes; two, that he may be seen as precursor to the young poets in Northern Ireland who have been making a stir, if not a Renaissance, since 1968. The first reason is cogent. MacNeice’s work didn’t issue from Auden’s overcoat; it is time to remove it from the simplifications ...”

“... helped by seeing herself as a Jew in Dachau or a Chinese concubine. It is necessary to know why we may be despised and exactly how contempt may be empowered to destroy us. To acquire such knowledge we have to find our own language and make it as exact as possible. When Emily Dickinson wrote of ‘infection in the ...”

“... identified, identity and the ability to distinguish between different identities is nothing. This may represent an ideal of Shakespeare’s, who was the father of twins, though of different sex. There is nothing more frustrating for parents than mistaking their own twins. They feel guilty and at the same time awed that they cannot distinguish between two ...”

“... us reality.’ What professional psychologists or Martin’s professional colleagues may make of this I don’t know: it is not my country. Although we do not encounter ‘isons’ elsewhere, the first three chapters of the book in fact cover very similar ground in a different tone of voice. But the final chapter on ‘culture and ...”

“... she says, ‘is a synonym for intercourse.’ But consensual intercourse may be even worse than rape because it reduces women to the state of ‘collaborators’. Throughout this book, men are compared to the Nazis, though ‘from Auschwitz to the Gulag’ there is ‘no analogue amongst subordinated groups’ to the condition of ...”

“... book plays for roughly the first 24 hours of peace in a small town in Germany, on a Wednesday in May 1945; and yet, as we shall see, and as the translation has it, a little fortuitously, because the word is Ruhe (‘quiet’), ‘there’s never a moment’s peace in our town.’ There is a famous concrete poem/ calendar which goes something like ...”