“... literary debate. Intellectual culture thrives upon debate. Although opponents of deconstruction may accuse it of nihilism and anti-humanism, nothing could be more humanistic than vigorous arguments about the nature and aim of literature. Deconstruction has forced traditionalists to look to their assumptions and protect their theoretical flanks. Defensive ...”

“... and Prediction’, that is, in its present form, new. The Uniqueness of the Individual, I may add, was reprinted, with a new introduction, by Dover Books in 1981. As for their themes, we can let the author speak for himself. ‘In so far as the essays collected have a central or recurrent theme, it is in the attempt to answer the following ...”

“... the two lovers have driven through a curfew blockade. (This is one of the two places where you may feel got at by underlined meanings too obvious to be worth noticing. The other point is at the second entry of the Strauss song, when Billy madly types out his St Luke-cum-Tolstoy question, ‘What then shall we do?’ and Kiri Te Kanawa is boosted far beyond ...”

“... beginning of her relationship with Virginia Woolf. She was talking about her cousin Eddy but it may leave one wondering what subtle category she had in mind for her own and her husband’s behaviour. As a young girl she had two relationships of the kind Mrs Glendinning calls ‘exciting’, one with Rosamund Grosvenor (‘what a funny thing it is to love a ...”

“... English-speaking section of the population, but with the Boers, the Afrikaners. As a group they may have had the reputation, at least among outsiders, of being provincial, unwelcoming, defiantly illiberal and racialistic, isolated from the rest of the world as much by their attitudes and language as by their geographical situation. Indeed, when my two older ...”

“... man’ – the learning of the lesson was itself a form of defiance and an aid to survival. I may be an ‘intellectual’ today, even though the word fills me with vague discomfort; I certainly was not one then, because of moral immaturity, ignorance and alienation; and if I became one later on, paradoxically, I owe that precisely to the Lager ...”

“... classic of Fin-de-Siècle gothic. For various reasons, they have been led to expect that they may receive important information regarding it at each of the leylines’ nodal points in turn. And do they? Well, sort of. At Lachrimae Christi, Cambridge (‘25th in the league table of college equities. And falling’), they meet up with Hinton’s former ...”

“... to give up on some corporate vision beyond the self-gratifying ego, in which individual existence may be at once fulfilled and transcended. Eliot’s career as a novelist is almost exactly coextensive with the period of high Victorian prosperity in which industrial capitalism is assuming a gradually more corporate form; and one of the many conflicts her work ...”

“... a poet is always willing to ‘let be’, he is merely the spirit’s celebrant. An erotic poet may respect the object in itself, but it is not characteristic of him to do so, and beyond the point of acknowledgment the only relevant spirit is his own and he is never willing to let be ... the object has helped him to define his power, and he is tender toward ...”

“... the best essay in the book, his fine celebration of Nabokov, has a kind of aural clatter: ‘I may also seem to be saying that if Lolita, the supreme novel of love in the 20th century, is a parody of earlier love novels, we should not be surprised, since love itself – the very love you and I experience in real life – is also a parody of earlier novels ...”

“... Cherno-with – a woman who holds every kooky belief that drives the militia movement – one may be appalled at the popular support for such people or happy that there are so few of them. The question that everyone wants answered is whether Fascism can return, but it’s not clear what that means. Ultra-nationalism, say, ...”

“... first rank. Still, it is handy to distinguish the two lines of development. Turing gave us what may turn out to be, in a sense, the last word on what is computable in a finite number of steps using any procedure whatsoever. At the same time he showed that only four types of step are needed (or fewer). Hence any computation can be achieved by sufficiently ...”

“... be seen.’ Along the way, though, Koestler suggests that ‘a man’s longing for the Holy Grail may become so strong that he flies like a moth into the flame; and having burned his wings, crawls back into it again.’ This is the ‘suicide hint’ which so irritated Hillary’s family and friends. (When I was a BBC talks producer in the mid-Sixties, I ...”

“... receipts pour in, and the governing committee doubles his wages. His wife has feared that Gedge may now be ‘giving away the Show ... by excess’, as before he almost dished them by restraint – but the point, of course, is that no excess can be too much for the vulgar multitude. The only real difference between Gedge’s original position as librarian ...”

“... great deal of harm; and Unger himself acknowledges that any major project of social transformation may well turn out to be massively and brutally unsuccessful in practice. But it certainly does not follow that there is nothing important to be learnt from his urgent and idiosyncratic voice. Like most radical social thinkers (perhaps like all social ...”