“... fact begin at the beginning and contains no mention of the Judgment of Paris or the fatal Horse, may well have been the reaction of Homer’s original audience. Instead of adding on other episodes, Homer brings a magnifying glass to the tale and fills the time by deepening his characters, by realising more fully their imagined world, by broadening the ...”

“... that ‘evil’ simply vitiates the possibility of artistic or cultural value. But Pound’s work may be read, and in my view should be read, as a critique of that very idea, the idea that art is a representation or execution of the best that has been known and thought in the world. In 1940 Pound’s fascism and anti-semitism were peculiarly intense, and he ...”

“... I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.’ Mandela may be released soon. If so, a new biography, with his full co-operation, may be possible. Fatima Meer’s book is full of interest, but it is not worthy of the man: it stops and starts several times, is full of gaps and ...”

“... to its adherents, it is only an hypothesis, like any other. The degree of assent you give it may depend on how little or how much the process is complicated by bringing into it the possibilities of human resistance and discrimination with respect to signs. Or it may depend on the degree to which the process is or is ...”

“... satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ally. Mandelson did not declare his enormous loan, acquired on such preferential terms that it was a gift by any other name, in the register of MPs’ interests. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry ...”

“... stupidity or cowardice to outsiders like myself – reporters from rich countries. Such reactions may be disguised, even for the purpose of deceiving oneself, but I believe they form the deep structure, the hidden wiring, the bias of Western reporting. Journalists may rail against a particular government, or the ...”

“... it, the theory then comes to stand in metaphorically for what it signifies. Political revolution may have many perils, but failing to concentrate the mind wonderfully is not among them. The endless digressions and self-interruptions of this study, as it meanders from Kant to Krishna, Schiller to Sati, belong, among other places, to a politically ...”

“... at the beginning that Wilder has ‘the gift of knowing what the truth looks like’, and that he may have this from being a journalist, you know that nothing too demanding is going to happen. This is the territory of received ideas backed up by false premises. But then there are real benefits to this approach. The slacker the question, the better Wilder’s ...”

“... anything nowadays except the theory of science? His own answer to this question is affirmative. It may seem that the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition in philosophy – the tradition that goes back to Frege and Russell and whose most prominent living representatives are Quine, Davidson, Dummett and Putnam – must return a negative answer. For that tradition ...”

“... catalogued. His first sexual experience was, famously, at the hands of his Presbyterian nursemaid, May Gray, when he was nine years old. There followed exploits with his fellow Harrovians; the chorister Edleston at Cambridge; countless whores in London; sailors at Falmouth; boys in Albania and the ‘buggery shops’ of Constantinople; his servants (male and ...”

“... of Yeats and critical studies of Orwell, Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. Bunting knew Yeats and Eliot; he may or may not have met Orwell. He truly detested Lawrence, first for locking him out on a window-ledge at a party (in Paris, I think) and then for slipping him some hashish baked into a pastry of some sort and not telling ...”

“... relegation of the topic to the relatively safe domain of metaphor is part of a tendency which may be seen in other writers, whether or not for similar reasons. Freudian discussions, so far as I know, do not normally raise the question of whether the use of cannibal metaphors might be implicated in a deep cultural reticence about the literal deed. In ...”

“... the edge of one wall. The doctor herself, when out on her rounds, a lonely figure on a night call, may – like others of her colleagues – be assaulted, or even killed, for the contents of her black bag. One of the sixty or so GPs interviewed by Gathorne-Hardy remembers practice in the East End of Glasgow in the Twenties: At night, walking through the slums ...”

“... are the same the world over, despite what the politicians say. Delve a little deeper, and you may get a bit more out of the book. Eddie does really care about the anonymous audience that may or may not watch him pirouetting on his balcony, and he has winning ways if you will only ...”

“... writing is nominally a review, preferring to concentrate on her own paraphrase and such points as may arise from it. So compulsively tendentious is her approach to creative literature at this time that when she announces her intention of reviewing a certain ‘anti-feminist thesis’ one assumes it is going to be a novel or a play, only to discover with ...”