“... ready for it, or at least ready to entertain the thought of its presence. Then we can read, if I may crudely transpose the process: ‘Frédéric bent forward; the parapet seemed a trifle wide to him and the thought of his own sheer weariness stopped him from climbing over.’ The psychology is not all that different. Frédéric is still not serious about ...”

“... that this passage doesn’t ring true or must have caused its author concealed distress. We may admit the tensions, and accept O’Brien’s explanation of them: but an ambivalence has two sides, the devil has two horns, and what Burke both loved and hated requires as attentive a treatment as what made him hate and love it. And is this ...”

“... such systems are episodes merely in the history of rival claims-to-truth. At this point the critic may want to respond that there is more to deconstruction than Rorty thinks. And if this means aligning oneself – strategically at least – with all those deluded seekers-after-knowledge, then that may be preferable to the ...”

“... then were? And yet English biographers, famous for their good judgment of people (which in itself may be a national stereotype, vice or collective delusion), following the good Dr Johnson – ‘I knew that poor wretch Savage’ (probably they drank together on two or three occasions) – commonly do just this: infer fact from fancy. We can become fair judges ...”

“... justifiably at those who had to wait for Barthes’s later work to realise he was human, but there may be some stragglers still, and this book should help them. Barthes discusses his debts to Sartre and Brecht, and the linguist Benveniste, remembers his early bouts of tuberculosis as hints of what might have been a vocation. The sanatorium, he says, was ‘a ...”

“... of military and medical incompetence hovers over the story of the fatal wound at Zutphen. And it may also be doubted whether the chivalric behaviour hymned by Sidney’s biographers was appropriate to the conditions of guerrilla warfare. Greville commends Sidney less for what he did, which in politics was so little, than for what he was. But what was ...”

“... as he does, and the philosophic bases for the view: something, as he modestly says, that ‘may be useful’ for further reflection. Among everything else, therefore, the book presents us with the need to distinguish very carefully between such not entirely deconstructionist views as Professor Bloom’s, say – I follow Fletcher both in my notion of ...”

“... straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn’t!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the ‘ghost’ at the Polytechnic) wholly out of implacable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by ...”

“... genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up questions of an appeal to different reading publics, as well as their respective quotients of Bourdieusian ‘distinction’. Wittenberg’s ...”

“... long timescale of global warming has often made it hard to mobilise a majority against damage that may occur decades, or even generations, in the future. That timescale no longer looks quite so distended, after the last few years of serial disaster – fire, storm and flood – but air pollution provides an even more urgent motive for change: millions are ...”

“... conceit that he can destroy the Iranian regime by a method short of war; on the other hand, Trump may actually be tempted by the promise of military action in Venezuela, where the US can show its muscle quickly and with impunity.With these new advisers, Trump is more thoroughly committed to war than he may have realised ...”

“... among its workaholic staff, and an alleged affair between Kinder and Lay’s personal assistant may have caused a rift between the two men. Kinder’s replacement, Jeff Skilling, was a ‘big strategy’ man rather than a tight-wad. He was a Baker scholar from the Harvard Business School – in other words, in the top 5 per cent of an already elite MBA ...”

“... with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, and ‘to use any influence they may have, to achieve the decommissioning of all paramilitary arms within two years following endorsement in referendums North and South of the Agreement and in the context of the implementation of the overall settlement’. This was a million miles from a long ...”

“... very quickly as prices and the pattern of orders shift. An algo-sniffer or statistical arbitrageur may have a little more time: I’ve been told, for example, that statistical arbitrage programs may hold a position for as long as a day (and in some cases even longer) before liquidating it. Even in those cases, however, an ...”

“... of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although ...”