“... respectively. Pears’s own lecture courses at Oxford and UCLA (from which this book is drawn) may have followed this pattern, but he encourages continuity. He is not one to say, with Mr Bryan Magee in his recent BBC series The Great Philosophers,* that ‘since Wittgenstein repudiated his own early philosophy, and since in any case it is now his later ...”

“... Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but another is specific enough: ‘Biography is by nature the most universally profitable, universally pleasant of all things: especially biography of distinguished individuals.’ Carlyle’s principles were more ...”

“... Such a tendency will not be confined, I believe, to the other side of the Irish Sea. In future, we may need to distinguish Modern English literature, a Romantic offshoot of the same type and vintage as Irish, Scottish and American literature, from an older English literature as well as from the generic subject of Literature in English. In other words, the ...”

“... in the past). On historical precedent, Waterstone’s should win; but, like Barnes and Noble, it may lose the next battle. Smith’s and Waterstone’s are fighting a civil war, while the real enemy invades from cyberspace. Amazon.com began as a one-man operation in a garage three years ago. The garage-owning founder (now chief executive officer), Jeff (now ...”

“... the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any of the lads from school put a hand up my skirt in the handball alley, but the anxiety persisted. Gabriel might show up at any moment and announce that the Holy ...”

“... its neglect of quantitative constraints and semantics. The suggestion that syntax and semantics may have evolved independently at first then combined leads to the study of the first shared lexicon, the commonalty of unitary learned symbols that resulted from the convergence of individual expressive choices into a socially accepted pattern, and that preceded ...”

“... brats. ‘She had 2 Bastards, others say Three,’ Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear ...”

“... claim: ‘This change began, to speak approximately, as we must, in the 17th century and may be described as the transition in the art of the West from a poetics of hallucination typical of Spenser to a poetics of delirium, inaugurated by Milton’. The West? That is a large claim. The change Teskey claims Milton represents is not a clean ...”

“... like critical legal studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its ...”

“... neighbours and associates was so common as to be considered normal. In the light of this book, we may have to consider whether this is not also a part of the British way of life. According to the authors, Henry Kerby, a Tory MP, reported to MI5 on his fellow Parliamentarians. George Wigg, a Labour MP, told MI5 all he could find out about what was going on in ...”

“... of painting never assert their individuality in this way. The life of a piece of sculpture may of course be endangered by the material it is made of: bronzes were melted down to make canons; Inca gold sculpture was pretty often turned into ingots. The process of making can sometimes be understood by just looking at a surface. Penny shows a detail from ...”

“... are always more or less absurd. Hopkins said, ‘Christ is your only literary critic,’ and it may be added that He does not run a book club. But Lewis certainly achieved the distinction of being represented, on an upper floor of Wheaton College, Illinois – Billy Graham’s old college – in the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as ...”

“... really fail quite as badly as this book implies? Should not future editions include entries on May McKisack (an expert Medievalist), on Dorothy George (who pioneered the scholarly study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie Zemon Davis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really ...”

“... Gary Bennett were not strangers or even remote acquaintances but friends and that whatever else may be said in its favour the Preface was a sharp personal attack, bred out of disappointment.’ Maybe there are moments when humanists can see things rather more clearly than theologians. Certainly, that passage contrives to put Bennett’s conduct in the ...”