“... Any explanation must have recourse to a Braudelian longue durée, in which destruction can be progress – utter devastation turned into a lasting blessing – because capitalist progress is destruction, of a more or less creative sort. In 1945 unconditional surrender forced Germany, or what was left of its western part, into what Perry Anderson has ...”

“... Brain​ science has historically been populated by corpse diggers, pig torturers, vivisectionists, logicians, entertainers, quacks, and quiet careful people who spend a great deal of time with fruit flies. Indeed it hasn’t always been taken as read that the brain was responsible for much at all. Thinking and feeling were most often attributed to the heart, though the second-century physician Galen had other ideas ...”

“... machines were already in use in Chicago, and on their way to Detroit. At the parts plant, by contrast, she had eased the oppressive routine of the working week by wearing a gingham dress, ‘And I could bully the foreman and everybody.’ Though she didn’t mention a Saint Monday, her week had a regular high ...”

“... renewal: Presbyterians sometimes split to survive. In the Highlands rival congregations exist side by side: the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland, the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), all of which claim to be the true Church of Scotland (these are the main ...”

“... least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. A very early reference appears in the Zhenyuan Miaodao Yaolue (Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things), a text attributed in part to the third-century alchemist ...”

“... they assumed you were good at logic. It became clear that Davidson had a system, but it needed to be pieced together by the reader, as best he or she could. Puzzlement about a particular Davidson piece would be met with a knowing look from the initiated and the query ‘But have you read ...”

“... through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. ‘All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.’ The ‘unfettered self’, or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract ...”

“... the smugly ‘fair-minded’, ever-so-right-thinking way in which his tragic story was handled by reviewers.) It is significant, then, that happiness is nowhere a theme for Foucault. No doubt he experienced some happinesses, but happiness formed no part of his philosophy – unlike that of his master Nietzsche, whose Daybreak and Zarathustra are irradiated ...”

“... I will never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other ...”

“... sa vie et ses ouvrages’, is plagiarised from two articles in the Southern Literary Messenger by John R. Thompson and John M. Daniel. Daniel’s article is plagiarised in its turn from Griswold’s obituary of Poe – a fraud within a fraud within a fraud. Traduttore: tradittore. If, as the Italians say, to translate is to traduce, isn’t plagiarism a ...”

“... necessarily intertwined in literature and literary criticism’ is the question vigorously debated by the 19 contributors to Shakespeare Left and Right, a question repeatedly and vehemently asked in the current American debate about ‘political correctness’. But in this scene from Julius Caesar the relationship between politics and poetics is not imported ...”

“... Inspired by the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming clocks, garish oriental rugs and draped curtains could form the chosen, or at any rate tolerated, habitat of the austere master of unease ...”

“... I have been reading again The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers. Barbara Reynolds says that this book – together with her famous series of radio dramas The Man Born to be King – is her greatest work. And Barbara Reynolds should know. She is the goddaughter of Sayers; she is a distinguished Italian scholar and collaborated with Sayers on her translation of The Divine Comedy (a collaboration fascinatingly written up in her book The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L ...”

“... you will have to go through very serious examinations. If you wish to pass them you must always be yourself. There is something crooked, something faulty about you. Don’t try to conceal it.’ ‘I am not going to conceal it.’ ‘And be good and kind. Always be good. All your ...”

“... fire in her sitting-room. Arthur said: ‘Well, I’ll leave you girls to get on with it. I’ll be in my study. I have work to do.’ We all know Arthur keeps his pornography collection in his study. I lit up a cigarette, gave my usual few coughs, and settled myself into the comfy leather chair. Pauline fetched an ashtray from the kitchen, impatiently put ...”