“... the Coastal Path at the close of a hard winter. Amateur geologists, rockhounds, and collectors may be distinguished by commitments to task-specific outerwear, but a bin bag rain poncho is not the measure of a person. Ideas gather around phenomena as though for warmth. Between art and science, our method is the stage upon which the universal plays in the ...”

“... must, I’m afraid, be largely a catalogue of complaints. The first, with which many of the others may seem to be related, concerns the title, and the fact that the subject is so named throughout the book. Even on the thousandth repetition it still seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank ...”

“... by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence.* There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether too thin-skinned’ and ‘you’re too thin-skinned altogether.’ The latter, Dolan ...”

“... in fallacy. The first is the quest for ‘levels’ of meaning in literary and other works. A poem may allow several readings (literal, allegorical, metaphorical, and so on), which develop with its movement, and take their structure from the narrative which unites them. Dante, in the Convivio, describes four such ‘levels’ of meaning, and the tradition ...”

“... make Dallas. It is recognised that life in the states of the South-West has taken in the past, and may yet take again, a distinctive shape: but the distinction is dealt with by allowing that the life is, like the landscapes where it happens, picturesque and bizarre. And after all ‘picturesque’ and ‘bizarre’ are epithets that we need not withhold from ...”

“... he noted: ‘Formerly I should have jumped at such an opening. I am now too far advanced. Yet I may go.’ It’s like Crusoe feeling he can’t use the ship-wrecked money but then deciding to keep it, accelerated to the tempo of farce. One isn’t sure whether the social climbing has abated or whether a need to say so has developed: the distinction ...”

“... up – and it will end up, as with all other poets whatsoever, by having its ups and downs – one may certainly say now that his work has not been digested, by those who reckon they have a digestion for such things, in the way that that of Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Hardy has been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral ...”

“... not just in it?’ Nagel says he’s ‘using the term “religious temperament” in a way that may seem illegitimate to those who are genuinely religious’, but it won’t seem illegitimate to those engaged in what Johnston calls the ‘truly religious … life’, only to most of those who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as ...”

“... great mystery’ of the president’s ‘power over the very continuance of the world’ may seem excessive, but he’s channelling, so he claims, Dick Cheney, who appears to believe that the president, by virtue of his control of the nuclear bomb, is freed from all constitutional – and even ordinary ethical – restraints. The meaning of ...”

“... 11 May 2000. I’m driving comfortably up the M74 through the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard ...”

“... prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly’. But it opens with great generosity, even warmth. I begin with its opening passage, having changed a word here and there, in order to suggest that Oxford has its continuities: Few English literary theorists command more ...”

“... is just a prop on a stage set. Far from wishing to satirise the society which her characters may be thought of as representing, Murdoch scarcely acknowledges its existence. Her attentive gaze is fixed on deeper realities: the fundamentals of the human condition, which she thinks of as cutting across and below the contingent map of wealth and class. The ...”

“... to suggest that the figures relate to hard currency rather than human beings. Which, indeed, they may. For those bold spirits who continue to produce CDs of New Music in the traditional Modernist sense, such sums are unimaginable. Content with worldwide sales of two or three thousand units, overjoyed with the occasional nine or ten, and disappointed only when ...”

“... you were born. If you don’t remain there, but retain some of your native accent, your identity may be partially defined by ambiguous relations to places, class positions and the sounds of your own voices. Many people’s speech is unstable in just this way, and when poets are congratulated by reviewers for having ‘found a voice’, I wonder whether their ...”

“... a crucial role in legal interpretation. Those who disagree with him on the substantive issues may be tempted to charge that his theory of adjudication is just an excuse for reading his own moral and political preferences into the law. One of the many virtues of his new book is that it enables one thoroughly to examine and to dispose of that ...”