“... is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist ...”

“... the machinations of the liberal elite, when all he means is that Polly Toynbee and Andrew Marr may have had dinner in the same North London restaurant as Jon Snow. He wishes to stir up populist disgust at the idea of a liberal, self-satisfied elite – nice, coming from the back of a chauffeur-driven car or from the gold-plated elevator at Trump Tower ...”

“... trails – and they can manoeuvre with acrobatic flexibility. Some have suggested that the UFOs may be prototypes that belong to the US, citing precedents like the Roswell incident of 1947, when an object that many believed to be an alien craft crash-landed on a ranch in New Mexico: it wasn’t until the 1990s that the US government revealed that what was ...”

“... On​ 2 May 2008 Cyclone Nargis slammed into the Irrawaddy delta in Burma, killing 140,000 people overnight. Three million more were made homeless. Worse may be around the corner. Rising sea levels and shifting rainfall patterns threaten the livelihoods of the country’s poorest ...”

“... by all those that woman alone can give to our imagination.’ ‘Little does he know’, we may hear the inventor of this dialogue murmuring. A man who is desperate about his poor luck in love – ‘I had just realised … that I loved her and that probably I was not loved and perhaps never would be’ – is consoled by the visit of a strange ...”

“... read them. Works like this are performances, and even if you don’t want to read every word you may want to watch them in action, as you can on UbuWeb. Seeing him read from No. 109 2.7.92-12.15.93 (1993) – a concrete poem that collects every word ending in the vowel sound / ə / or ‘schwa’ – you’re reminded of his admiring description of ...”

“... 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 ...”