“... be a misrepresentation. Depending on which deconstructionist text one reads, deconstruction may be seen as a philosophical system, a critique of systems, an analysis of the conditions of system-making, a method, a critique of method, a mode of reading, a mode of literature in its own right, or as all or none of these things. Nor are the consequences of ...”

“... satisfactorily described. The consumption of all kinds of book is problematic. Purchased books may not be read; books which are read may be taken or mistaken in a multitude of ways. There is no ratings system which will tell us for books, as for television, what gratifies and what does not. All we have are the crude and ...”

“... but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard littte shell of his own and out of ...”

“... seems, that certain subjects are inevitably more interesting than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than ...”

“... recently begun to take at all seriously; and it possesses an immediacy which appears, though this may be a delusion, to allow, as he claims, ‘the voices of these peasants to reach us directly, without barriers’. Carlo Ginzburg is also a highly sensitive and imaginative historian whose prose style reproduces much of his mother Natalia’s clarity and ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... of past blindness and Victorian prejudices: offering his edition of a Wordsworth Prelude that may never fully have come into being and whose brief existence, if it had one, is beyond proof, Duncan Wu reminds us once more of the insubstantiality of any claim to know just what Wordsworth was about. Wordsworth’s textual being and meaning changed ...”

“... debt-ridden lawyer-politician from achieving his potential income. Indeed, ‘O’Connell may well have had more at stake in the Catholic question, materially speaking, than any other person in the United Kingdom.’ His resentment was both intensified and balanced by a remarkable self-confidence, and MacDonagh is particularly good at showing how the ...”

“... On 9 May 1933, A.E. Housman, Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly, delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. In the course of it he quoted ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and he quoted it as ‘where art thou roaming?’ He had omitted to verify his memory of something so well-known ...”

“... It is compelled to cry out for some notion of what lies in store. And the answers to such cries may be terribly influential, as well as wrong. This is the real reason the curious activity of prophecy counts for so much. The most garbled, or even insane, forecast can end up moving things in one direction rather than another. Illusions, too, ...”

“... Fascists. These were the clandestine product midnight hours, and according to SOE archives, which may or may not be accurate, we printed 1,200,000 leaflets between September 1940 and February 1941, when things went out of control; we undoubtedly printed a great many. Such was more or less how we began, a handful of us ...”

“... of their existence. I know because I was once interviewed for MI6 without realising it. (Or it may have been for the Information Research Department.) It was when I was about to graduate from Cambridge, and a fellow of my college suggested I try. Only on his death much later did I learn, from his obituary, of his MI6 connections. By then, complaints had ...”

“... up flares of his own. Yet these lights and shadows leave some objects shrouded in darkness. One may read widely in Jameson in particular without coming across a description of political equality or freedom, or any non-capitalist ideal he thinks might now be carried over from theory into practice; and when his statements of solidarity do emerge, they quickly ...”

“... in his correspondence, that this Byron fixation has something to do with bisexuality – which may mean that ‘Lisztomania’, Heine’s term for crazed female devotion to the virtuoso, had a lot in common with the ‘fag-hag’ devotion previously inspired by castrati. By, say, a singer like Farinelli. Both performers did seemingly impossible ...”

“... should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.) Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty ...”