“... he has found; the next two volumes will be about attitudes to suicide: damning in the sources we may call official (The Curse on Self-Murder); complicated, we are to understand, in the more inward commentary of ‘medieval psychologists, poets and pastors’. The last volume will be called The Mapping of Mental Desolation, which sounds gloomy enough, but ...”

“... reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’. Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is ...”

“... two positions produce an antinomy or aporia, not the potentially productive contradiction that may lead us to a higher plane of understanding and a more effective way of acting. As such, they reflect or express the current dilemmas of a late capitalist, liberal democratic society in which we can’t make up our minds whether we actively create the social ...”

“... myth had been reinforced or even initiated by porphyria. Skin conditions such as hypertrichosis may cause hair to grow over the face and hands, but have no psychiatric manifestations. Rabies in humans may induce an agitated, furious state of mind with biting and hallucinations, but without skin changes. Illis pointed out ...”

“... attitudes and unofficial beliefs in material which we have never looked at or thought about – it may be the plan of a primitive burial ground or a 19th-century photograph of a dead infant. And, like Edgerton, he shows us how things which are familiar to us as art were shaped by a faith which is unfamiliar even to today’s believers. As we approach this ...”

“... on top, or whose thousand crimes count for nothing against the sign of the Cross, even though he may, notionally at least, have been poisoning with diluted penicillin half the babies of Vienna. ‘Notionally at least’ – that is the crux of the matter. ‘Faith’ in Greene is like the ‘story’: you take both on trust. But where does truth come ...”

“... historians of the modern period, as well as others, would do well to take ritual seriously. They may discover that its role hasn’t changed as much as one would think it had, despite the disappearance, at any rate in the industrialised world, of ‘traditional’ societies. ‘Traditional societies’, though, is much too vague. There are important ...”

“... bond’ as the heart of liberalism, and deplores the possibility of ‘unleashing forces that may rapidly destroy all hope of reestablishing civil dialogue’. Indeed, there is in some of his remarks an almost Habermasian sense that the agreement actually arrived at in the context of an unconstrained dialogue or communication between social agents would ...”

“... Elizabeth Wilson in the introduction to Adorned in Dreams, a study of fashion which, in itself, may help to render such justifications redundant; her book is the best I have read on the subject, bar none. Fashion is part of social practice: it is an industry whose demands have helped to shape modern history, and choosing our clothes is the nearest most of ...”

“... the use of such words as ‘slaves’ or ‘castes’ in describing colonies of ants, because it may imply that if these practices are natural to them they are legitimate also for us. The biologist thinks that both the similarities and the differences are so obvious that it is convenient to use the words and ‘unnecessary to drag in all the possible ...”

“... to linguistics is by no means the same thing as an introduction to the study of language. This may come as a surprise to those laymen who have always assumed that ‘linguistics’ is just the official academic name for the academic study of language. They would thus interpret the title of Professor Lyons’s book as being for all practical purposes ...”

“... to expose the true horror of bourgeois society. Civilisation certainly extends our sympathies; it may deepen our understanding of European history; but it avoids challenging contemporary complacency – it is too affable. It encourages admiration more often than criticism (which is certainly not the case with Berger’s sermons): but in doing so it fails to ...”

“... faith          Was easy prey to his malignancy …The word ‘prey’ feels how intimate may be the bonds between trusting and tasting. Both the first and this last poem in the book speak of ‘my tongue’.Field Work is alive with trust (how else would field work be possible?), and it could have been created only by an experienced poet secure in the ...”

“... because Keats (who wrote ‘What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet’) may have had nothing against getting fucked from behind, and because Bird’s five-page, much-shared-on-the-internet ‘Monica’ doesn’t make the sitcom any better. It might, however, make your life better, if you accept its monitory advice: although I believe ...”

“... not seen posed elsewhere: why did not one Tory MP abstain from the vote of confidence in Theresa May? The whole process felt a little uncanny. The poll was triggered in secret one night and fully concluded by the next. Turnout was a Stalinist 100 per cent – a figure only achieved by allowing two MPs who had lost the whip over allegations of sexual ...”