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“... so that there already seems to be more theory than practice, which is, after all, the trend. As Stanley Fish remarks in a magisterial afterword to Veeser’s collection, most of these people are not doing New Historicism but only talking about doing it, often in prose that has taken on that self-important semi-illiteracy of which I have already ...”

“... article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 November 1990 reported the now notorious affaire in which Stanley Fish, Chairman of the English Department at Duke University and a major national power-broker of the theory trade, wrote to the Provost of the University demanding that local members of the National Association of Scholars should be banned from ...”

“... His confession used the phrase ‘social construction’ just twice in a five-page essay. Stanley Fish, who teaches at Duke University, which publishes Social Text, and a man widely regarded as the very dean of advanced (literary) ‘theory’, replied on the oped page of the New York Times. There, he used the phrase, or its cognates, 16 times in ...”

“... volume, Jeremy Waldron, dismissing as ‘a trivial version of intentionalism’ a passage of Stanley Fish which strikes accurately at the soft core of this dualism: ‘there cannot be a distinction between interpreters who look to intention and interpreters who don’t, only a distinction between me differing accounts of intention put forward by ...”

“... in the words on the page, but in our response to them. But if you want to claim with the likes of Stanley Fish that the words on the page have no say at all in the matter, then you cannot logically speak of response – you cannot answer the question ‘What is it that you are finding beautiful?’ Your experience is no more an experience of this work of ...”

“... its divorce from everything factive and circumstantial. Just as for later critics like de Man and Stanley Fish, for Brooks poetry is an intertextual system.’ McGann writes with a courtesy to opponents unusual in books as forthright and combative as his are. But most informed readers would, I think, recognise in these words a simplication of Brooks’s ...”

“... will be preparing for exile in Bermuda, or some other far-flung corner of their former realm: Port Stanley, say, or Balmoral. Paul Burrell will have packed their bags for them one last time. The ‘irony’ of which, as Burrell would say (the only words that he misuses more often are ‘surreal’ and ‘enormity’), is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as ...”

“... in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given a lecture at Cambridge. ‘I go back to Africa,’ he said, ‘to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.’ When I arrived at my hotel in ...”

“... closets, there wouldn’t be any hooks, and if there weren’t any hooks, there wouldn’t be any fish, and that would suit me fine. To speak, as I believe is still common, of Groucho’s ‘one-liners’, as if this were his characteristic genre of response, is not helpful, not just because it is so incomplete, even inaccurate, but because what it omits ...”

“... real world, as in James McMichael’s ‘Compline’: Gudique is the chastening. She is not a fish. She is not the rocks where she browses nor the pools. The river when it opens is not Gudique. When its forgetfulness falls from it, when a cold wind leaks upward through the drifts and folds and pours over the banks and over the ferns this is ...”

“... One can find,’ wrote Stanley Spencer, ‘interesting and very nice things in dustbins and incinerators.’ Ferreting about among rubbish heaps struck him as ‘a distinctly entertaining and elevating pastime’ and the beads, scraps of china and old books he disinterred ‘really satisfied my highest thoughts ...”

“... inspirational professor of Chinese at Edinburgh). Last, and most improbable, was the great painter Stanley Spencer, a jumbled Christian Socialist who made his way to China wearing pyjamas as underclothes beneath his suit. Anyone who took part in grand freebies of this sort during the Cold War will remember their texture. At one extreme of the British cast of ...”

“... Like Bjartur, the shepherd settler-hero of the great Laxness novel Independent People (1934-35), fish was most of what they ate, and if not fish as we know it, then lumpfish or stockfish or torsk or ‘refuse fish’ or coalfish. Tobacco was chewed or sniffed. Coffee was an unlikely ...”

“... Sackey has a peaceful friend called ½-Allotey who has gone back to the land, dutifully breeding fish and growing beans in the bush, away from Accra. ‘This wild nonsense of trees!’ growls the professor, visiting ½-Allotey. ‘I am in an inappropriate place. I don’t want any of this nature-worship on the soil of Ghana. Change this place, change ...”

“... Who does Elvis Presley the man, symbol or democratic paradigm exclude? Who does he not sing for? Stanley Booth sets Presley in a different perspective. His piece on the King, a portrait of an innocuous, slightly obtuse young man aimless among the redundant ostentation of his home, is only one of 20 collected in Rythm Oil – another agglomeration of ...”