“... between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ‘old’ New Critics like Wimsatt and Brooks. Of course there is a shift of technical idiom, from the homespun rhetorics of Ambiguity, Irony and Paradox to a post-Saussurian language of signifier and signified, text and intertext. But Riffaterre’s ...”

“... in the context of poets and writers. Religion and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature. Their communication seems to short-circuit it. The ...”

“... Spanish ships; and Hawkins had not a shot left in his locker to oppose them. ‘There should be an infinite quantity of powder and shot provided, and continually sent abroad; for this is the greatest and strongest combination, to my understanding, that ever was gathered in Christendom; therefore I wish it, of all hands, to ...”

“... of torture’ now known as the ‘chartered jet’ or ‘transcontinental sleeper’. Driven by some collective urge, we flock abroad and return two weeks later exhausted and ready for a holiday. Why post-industrial man should display such ritualised migratory behaviour already seems mysterious. And future archaeologists will find our tourist networks as ...”

“... between men and women, and added that the women ought really to marry each other, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? I forgot the remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls. It may not have been the same ...”

“... Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each time to seem more important to the status and success of the poems. It is the regal touch. Life Studies are Lowell studies, in the ...”

“... zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the ...”

“... Can there be literature after reunification? It strikes one as something of a science fictional question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War Two, and proceeded to divide the United States down the middle into two zones with two decidedly different regimes of military occupation ...”

“... younger, knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed his death she was to see her uncle become vastly famous, not as Marvell’s ‘best satirist and in the right vein’ or Shaftesbury’s ‘worthy’, but as a rake of the most rapacious and an infidel of blackest ...”

“... he was some kind of meticulous master, but a master of the obvious, and anyone who is surprised by the ponderousness of his new work, Eyes Wide Shut, must have forgotten what the other films were like. Vincent LoBrutto, from whose biography (Faber, 1998) I’ve borrowed the above quotation, inadvertently sums up a whole career when he says: ‘Stanley ...”

“... many colleges and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust Studies; hardly a day goes by without a Holocaust-related story appearing in the New York Times. Polls show that many more Americans can identify the Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan. Consider the media attention given to Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing ...”

“... genre in the world. In Britain, big business has profited from the cultural changes brought about by the ‘rave revolution’: during the Nineties dance music magazines have gone from being small subscriber-only affairs to paper shop bestsellers; a premier league of DJs have made fortunes; some nightclubs have become brands worth millions of pounds, others ...”

“... iron or leather. Nevertheless, these two great wine-tasters held to what they had said. Time went by, the wine was sold, and when they came to clean out the cask, they found in it a small key hanging to a thong of leather; see now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. ...”

“... in the greatest danger were anti-Fascist Germans and Jews of any political persuasion, followed by assorted individuals who had blotted their copybooks in a manner the Gestapo was sure to ascertain or invent. ‘Human trafficking’ had become the order of the day and remained so, long after the hope of leaving by boat ...”

“... The result of the election is indeed a remarkable one: a Government liked and respected by few and despised by some preserved its already huge majority virtually intact, and it did so with a pitiful proportion of the eligible vote. The deficiencies of the electoral system are now more gross than ever, while a three-party system – in Scotland and Wales a four-party system – and differential turnouts have introduced a randomness and unpredictability which the overall results conceal ...”