“... and familiar, like the invention of printing or (once again) the effect of epidemics, and some may regard this as a display of fireworks: to me, it looks like decorated oversimplification of a rather scary kind. Perhaps aware of dangers of this kind, the inaugural lecture of 1973, with which the volume opens, resorts to the use of jargon ...”

“... generally takes into account the existence of parallel explanations or simultaneous pictures which may be equally valid: the fact that your model works does not make it the only possible model, nor does it ever cease to be a mere model. And secondly, one can’t help feeling that despite the brevity of the text there must be a much shorter and simpler way of ...”

“... But we have not managed anything new with two organs in three dimensions. The Roman vocabulary may therefore strike the English reader with a sense of déjà foutu. They had available, as we do, three levels of language: basic obscenities (five- and six-letter words); euphemisms and metaphors; medical terminology. The obscenities comprehend the ...”

“... genres. True, Fahrenheit 451 seemed to prove that Science Fiction was outside his range: but there may have been personal strains on Truffaut then – including that of filming in England, with uneasy backing and a perhaps too-pat idea. Tirez sur le pianiste, his second full-length feature, had actually been enrichedby mixing slapstick, melodrama, romance and ...”

“... contrasting as they do the disillusion of the sedentary, who wait in one place for what life may bring them, and the instinct of the migrant to get somewhere, anywhere, on his own feet. Bruce Chatwin’s latest book is about the idea of being a nomad. From his experiences in Australia he builds a case for fairly aimless wandering about, over large ...”

“... not describe why, for the most part, people read worthwhile books ...’ Robinson, one imagines, may have some explaining to do when he meets those whom, seven years ago, he induced to join him in the Open University tribute to Hill’s work. Someone who can write, straight-faced, of ‘worthwhile books’ obviously isn’t bidding to be the flavour of the ...”

“... of the natural landscape. The valley’s criminal fraternity, led by the psychopathic Clem, may be mindless hoodlums but they too have some of the glamour of outlaws recycling the wealth of the city. Conrad is hardest on his professional middle-class characters, living comfortably in their sterilised tower blocks but obsessed with the valley and its ...”

“... but the activity of remembering and interpreting it – takes on culturally specific meanings, and may come to signify an awareness of experience peculiar to one culture and not to the other, capable of being used by the one to dominate, expropriate and assimilate the other. In the North American context, it has been argued that ‘history’ is an ideological ...”

“... killed by oneself, and the first human social group, the matrilineal coalition or clan. Weird, you may well think. However, do not dismiss these ideas before you hear a bit more. This theory is designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions, and we should at least start to wonder why we find it so strange. For a ...”

“... criticism in all its vertiginous variety lead one to ponder what it is all about and where it may be heading. The book by René Wellek, focused on Central and Eastern European critics, is the penultimate volume of a vast project he began in the Fifties. The two previous volumes dealt respectively with English and American criticism in this same ...”

“... of Liberty has recently identified as a central component of the colonists’ world view. Clark may have erred in making militant Protestantism the hegemonic language of colonial politics, completely overshadowing secular political discourse, but his account helps to explain why the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted toleration to the Catholic Church in ...”

“... assumes a largely anthropological readership, and a concomitant level of knowledge: an outsider may find the rather lengthy discussions of technical aspects of kinship not always riveting. A less austere account of the lives of the anthropologists might have made up for this. Stocking notes that at the LSE Malinowski was not content with supervising his ...”

“... no Modernist by persuasion: Michelangelo and Poussin are my cup of tea.’ This may be a joke. He does cite with approval a remark of Adrian Stokes to the effect that ‘modern art, the art typical of our day, is the slang, so to speak, of art as a whole, standing in relation to the Old Masters as does slang to ordinary language,’ adding ...”

“... God Himself. As Lewis notes, this would be ‘a claim of far-reaching implications’. Indeed, it may have implications for the fundamentalist Muslim Khilafa movement so active in Britain today. Chapter Six of The Arabs in History was prefaced by a quotation from Rimbaud’s Illuminations, though its title, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, echoed that of ...”

“... Hollywood finance on Leaving Las Vegas.) Modern Hollywood is in denial about booze. Hard drinking may still have a glimmer of the macho aura that surrounded it when the Hemingway-influenced generation of screenwriters filled the studio writers ‘buildings in the Thirties, but in Nineties blockbuster movies even policemen and criminals mostly drink ...”