“... crime against divinity. Our idea of what such figures look like and how disappointing the reality may turn out to be is a large part of the myth. Another large part is our idea of ourselves. In the novel, Shelley gives us a wonderful hint of this through her use of the word ‘became’. Victor doesn’t say ‘when my father got married and had a ...”

“... haughty, headstrong creature! I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past.’ These words may make us like Nelly less, and the possibility is taken up in Fennell’s film.When Heathcliff returns, Cathy is married to Edgar. All is peaceful (if uninspired) and we get to admire Isabella’s artwork: painting, wallpaper, a doll’s house. Rather ...”

“... if they are to be contained or ameliorated. Whatever the casuistry of freemarket apologists may suggest, investments to reduce acid emissions from power stations or to bury railways out of harm’s way are public investments undertaken in the public interest, and not in order to maximise profits. At the same time, regulations are ...”

“... that the ‘argument’ has two sides, and exactly two. If you are not for us – whoever ‘we’ may be – you are against us. If you are not ‘pro-nuclear’ you are ‘anti-nuclear’. A corollary of this attitude is the assumption that the two sides of the story are mutually exclusive: one side will tell you the good news, and the other the bad. For the ...”

“... it is never so. History modifies literature, but literature, equally, modifies history. One may smoke here the different formalism of the Structuralists, who have had some success in tacitly reversing Marx’s materialist project (he thought he had transformed Hegel’s idealist dialectic by introducing material praxis; the Structuralists re-idealise ...”

“... no further use for the poem itself: indeterminacy thus insures a poem against prompt expiry and may even keep it enduringly fresh. Furthermore, if a poem can be paraphrased, it will fail to reflect the radically ‘meaningless’, indeterminate nature of our experience. Derek Walcott’s poems, informed and invigorated as many them are by a coherent ...”

“... insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable: but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation or even malice, is any less genuine.’ Here, en toutes lettres, is the polemicist’s warrant. Edward’s own indignations of this period were literary carmagnoles, without ...”

“... of constant mental excitement and wonder. He is awestruck by the thought of how a single place may have been the scene of numberless events through time, how a space defined by fixed co-ordinates may be occupied and re-occupied, each occupation leaving a residue of change, residue falling on residue to form a ...”

“... to be found the descriptions of the actual processes’ by which we die. This is fine, and others may have got it wrong, but in his grounds for denying the authority of experience to others Dr Nuland, too, is mistaken. Before our century there would have been no adult who had not seen – literally seen – some of his or her children, friends and, of ...”

“... heated by stoves’ contrasted with Fielding, who resembles ‘an open lawn, on a breezy day in May’. Most of the themes of Richardson criticism, before and since, are contained in Coleridge’s comments, and the blend of admiration and repugnance belonged to the case from the start. Contemptuous adversaries like Fielding himself paid glowing tributes to ...”

“... for the elegant simplicity of predictable replication as encoded by rigorous science, historians may wish to settle for the subtle complexity of real life as captured by a more plastic art. This may seem a heavy-handed way of saying that McNeill’s book is so satisfying because it implicitly addresses two different ...”

“... don’t have to, he was told – we’ll get the Prime Minister to do it. And so they did: on 13 May 1974 Harold Wilson announced a ‘dramatic revelation’ to the House of Commons, a suitably purple version of the ‘Doomsday Plot’ fed to Wilson by the Army puppet-masters. Wilson even went so far as to warn the House that ‘there will be an attempt to ...”

“... school-books, his product is not of the ordinary, useful, though humble kind. What will it be? It may be something of the highest utility; but, on the other hand, it may be something futile, or even harmful because unnatural and untimely. Harvard came to value him, but his career was marked by those key terms, ‘unnatural ...”

“... point is the Government taking control of people, taking their guns away.’ In her testimony on 5 May Ms McVeigh confirmed on oath that she had read The Turner Diaries at her brother’s repeated urgings. But now, as a principal prosecution witness (in return for immunity), she seemed less inclined to defend McVeigh’s favourite novel. You can buy The Day of ...”

“... Hardly had ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ been published than its author announced (in May 1799) his intention ‘to dedicate in silence the prime of my life’ to metaphysics, a turn made necessary, as he said a year later, by his sense that his ‘faculties’ were ‘dwindling’, or at least that they would not bear comparison with ...”