“... be the same something that they are, also hold that identity is relative. They think that a and b may coincide under the concept f, yet fail to coincide under some other concept g. For instance, I am the same person as won such and such a prize at school over fifty years ago, but not the same boy, for I am no longer a boy. Or again, the river in which I swam ...”

“... The proof of a theory may lie in its application, but application means very different things in different corners of the universe of the mind. Expecting an eclipse of the sun at a certain time and place, and for a certain duration, is one kind of application. Producing a silicon chip which programmes certain operations is another kind ...”

“... other learned historians look illiterate beside him. Though not a great lover of footnotes, which may still in his day have seemed a shade ungentlemanly, he used them, as ‘a necessary evil’, to support his historical narrative and to confound his contemporaries: but it turns out that even he exaggerated his acquaintance with primary archives. Anyway, he ...”

“... patient child. The theory’s fine, but in practice there would be great gaps in the sequence. It may be that all those games and tricks demanding superhuman patience, all those artefacts with tabs and slots and letters of the alphabet, requiring glue and paste and three right hands, all those infant pastimes which allegedly were easy enough for a previous ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... though transient, stir when they were published earlier this year. Their more lasting interest may lie in the light that they throw upon Taylor the practising historian, musing to a fellow historian about the mysteries of his craft. Taylor was regarded by many, not excluding himself, as the nation’s greatest living historian; and the personal and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”