“... doctrine that human nature is limited and life irredeemably imperfect. Terminus agrees with Robert Frost in saying ‘good fences make good neighbours’; and he also takes a classical view of artistic creation by insisting on formal constraints and closed symmetry. Although Terminus inhabits hedges and drystone walls, he is not a property of pastoral ...”

“... narrow individuality and their sense of history. The burgh, the town which is – or was – self-governing as a tiny urban unit and at the same time closely linked to the farming and crofting world of its hinterland, is in many ways the real locus of Scottish history, and also of Scottish imagining and writing. Most fiction which is not patrician in ...”

“... The devil is in the detail, they say, and this is certainly the case with the films of Robert Bresson. And if the devil is there, God can’t be far away. Or can he? These are very curious details, bits of the real but not part of any attempt at realism, pieces of a puzzle that may not even exist. Feet, legs, hands, sand, straw, mud, laceless old shoes; dulled or hallucinating faces staring past the camera at some lost version of infinity; countless shots of the backs of persons walking away from us, or figures whose heads are out of the frame most of the time; sound effects that threaten to take over the whole movie; an old tweed suit that moves us far more than the fake blood on a man’s face; passing cars that are more interesting than a couple going through the motions of an embrace in the foreground; acting that is not so much unprofessional as non-existent, a mere reciting of lines from a too perfectly written book ...”

“... geometric shapes that swung like chain mail as you walked. I sat in the chair while behind me Robert, the senior stylist, cast his professional eye over me, lifting hanks of my long hair with a comb and letting them drop, flicking sections this way and that to see how they fell, examining its possibilities. Finally, he pocketed his comb and with a sigh ...”

“... Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout – insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women – and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver – the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie humaine set in Los Angeles ...”

“... or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ‘experimental’. A poem, Fisher said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a ...”

“... acquiring the associated status of those who can wait an hour longer than others for their food. Self-nourishing and self-fashioning both happen at the table. The relationship between the powerful moral and ontological capacities of diet and the authority of dietary expertise isn’t new, but its texture has changed ...”

“... to them. The author of the entry on animals in the Oxford Companion to the Mind, the ethologist Robert Hinde, writes that ‘chimpanzees have a conception of the self and can dissemble and deceive others,’ and that there is strong evidence that ‘dogs have pleasant and unpleasant dreams.’ Someone must have forgotten ...”

“... Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood). But whereas the high-minded Brookner woman is given to maundering over Balzac or Flaubert, Isabel derives her vicarious ...”

“... and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by answering questions with independent judgment and in direct language. Yes, he is in favour of abortion on demand. Yes, he is in favour ...”

“... wrote (in a piece in the London Magazine in 1979) that Quin ‘was not one of those authors who self-consciously strove to be an innovator, rather she had to seek a different form for each theme which occupied her mind’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was first reading her novels, the people I knew who liked that kind of thing were mostly ...”

“... Scottish Renaissance into the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in ...”

“... to Hawkes, O’Connor admitted that ‘the devil teaches most of the lessons that lead to self-knowledge.’ In the years since, critics have abandoned a Catholic interpretation of her work in favour of a psychological and secular approach. If this amounts to a betrayal of O’Connor’s ‘anagogical vision’, perhaps that’s no bad thing: her ...”

“... age. Anyhow, the version of anti-intellectualism that’s current is Psychological Darwinism, and Robert Kurzban’s new book is a typical instance. I’ll take a paragraph or two to sketch the connection between what Psychological Darwinists say and the anti-intellectualist thesis that there aren’t any minds. After that, I’ll focus on the latter, as does ...”

“... empirical truth. Aristotle was a pioneer, perhaps, in what I believe to be the commonest form of self-deception in science: the kind of attachment to a dearly loved hypothesis that predisposes us (yes, all of us) to attach a special weight to observations that square with and thus uphold our pet hypotheses, while finding reasons for disregarding or attaching ...”