“... Gray’s poetry that has something to do with his instinct for Latin. The ‘massive calm’ that William Empson found and resented in the Elegy – and that might well have soothed Wolfe and his comrades – surely derives from this. Empson heard in Gray’s famous lines on the unfulfilled potential of the humble villagers the poet’s melancholy acceptance ...”

“... which opened the same year as Fraser, concentrated on British artists, such as Phillip King, William Tucker, Barry Flanagan, Paul Huxley and later Bridget Riley, whereas Fraser covered British, American and European art. John Kasmin, who opened his gallery the following year, dealt in British and American art. He and Fraser were the rivals for ...”

“... boy who has done this thing has disgraced himself as an Etonian, as a gentleman, as a Christian, and as a man.’ He went on to foretell the disastrous future which could only fall to the lot of the instigator of so sacrilegious an act. I do not know whether the delinquent was incriminated by the school authorities at the time, but these ...”

“... school-prayer flapdoodle. The second reason is that Gingrich himself is not excited by these ‘Christian Coalition’ hysterias. He criticised Jesse Helms the other day, when that ghastly old pervert proposed a cut-off in funding for Aids research on the grounds that homosexuals deserved what they got. He criticised Charles Murray’s notorious tract The ...”

“... from the psychological dimension?’Giorgio Agamben, The End of the PoemThere is a moment​ in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with. This is about as unreal as a ...”

“... at the outset of his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes in 1659, the upholding of Christian freedom requires ‘that for belief or practice in religion according to this conscientious persuasion, no man ought to be punished or molested by any outward force on earth whatsoever’. Milton always presents himself as no less hostile to the control ...”

“... of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of ...”

“... outsiders – first Columbus, and then the heroic scientists who opposed Aristotelian and Christian orthodoxy – made progress possible; at the same time, that progress was ‘inevitable’, because the discovery of empirical facts in itself determines their acceptance. But was mainstream, institutional culture really so backward? There are good ...”

“... and insisted that ‘if we are industrious we shall never starve.’ By the mid-19th century, Christian exhortation to good works and the conviction of employers that they had a right to demand long hours of poorly remunerated labour were an almost omnipotent ideological mix. Carlyle announces in Past and Present (1843) that ‘all work, even ...”

“... It started at the ocean with the French, who imagined themselves as the defenders of Christian civilisation against the barbarous denizens of the forests across the Rhine. But then it turns out that the Germans also saw themselves as the front-line defenders of Europe against primitive uncultured Slavs, in particular the untidy, untrustworthy ...”

“... Milk. The authenticity of Florence’s spiritual powers was vouched for by a Victorian scientist, William Crookes, who also became besotted with ‘Katie King’, the spirit whose materialisations were the high point of Florence Cook’s séances. There was no middle ground in the 19th-century Spiritualist debate. Either the voice you heard and the form you ...”

“... a panel on ‘Feminist Criticism Revisited: Where Are We Going? Where Have We Been?’ (Barbara Christian, Florence Howe, Jane Gallop, Nancy Miller, and me) attracted 1800 people, who jammed the aisles to hear that although the women’s movement is in disarray, feminist criticism, while no longer a coherent critical movement, has been fully assimilated ...”

“... study of Gladstone and religion, Parry traces many of the leadership’s beliefs back to their Christian roots. The Whigs, he shows, subscribed to a ‘manly’ Protestantism, free alike from the ‘effeminacy’ of Ritualism and the zealous bigotry of Dissent. At the heart of their creed lay a conception of the Church as a tolerant, all-embracing ...”

“... social death at Magdalene – he never seriously purported to be other than he was. He exhumed his Christian name in post-war politics and made it into a distinctive trademark, whereas to remain Peter would have left him swimming in a pool of Anthonys and Olivers and Harolds and Hughs. It was thought very funny at the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator ...”

“... is the desired sense of oneness, an experience both intense and releasing, in which Eastern and Christian myths come together. In its attempt to portray Stone’s state of mind, the prose becomes clotted, a mixture of involvement and detachment (for a quirky humour is still at work – the horse of death is less messenger from hell than variety turn, down ...”