“... 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 ...”

“... Mihalic (Croat) and Vasko Popa (Serb) are ‘Yugoslav’. This is excusable. And the Greeks, it may be thought, have looked out for themselves; also, less certainly, the Russians. But what have the Bulgars done wrong? And haven’t the Israelis looked after their own interests as efficiently as the Greeks after theirs? This is no way to start reviewing a ...”

“... essay’. As he became famous, he got above himself, became portentous. But although this may be true, the crucial change is simply in the quality of the writing. Murray the reviewer had dash and decisiveness, and also generosity. He wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1975 a review of Auden’s Thank you, Fog which is also an obituary. After ...”

“... one might argue that whatever the nature of the problem of ‘explaining what-it’s-like-ness’ may be (if it is a genuine problem at all), it cannot be a problem for physics because physics concerns itself only with factors needed to predict the trajectories of particles and fields, and Strawson has given no reason to think that the additional ideas which ...”

“... humanity. Greek language, etymology, rituals, the scattered fragments of the Dionysiac tradition, may all play their part in this project of recuperation. In fact, Young laments the ‘decline’ of Hellenic studies in this country – and, with that decline, the loss of those collective dreams of the primitive past that we can experience only through the ...”