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“... them. But the rest of us should not believe them. Oddly enough, the Conservative Party is by no means unique in possessing a highly misleading mythology about its past. The Liberal Party, as was, had its share of fairy-tales. So, too, does the Labour Party. Most people continue to think of the Liberals as just a gentler, kindlier version of the Tories. That ...”

“... into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, was first ...”

“... and the Apollonian (a term surely preferable to Silk and Stern’s ‘Apolline’), by no means merely represent, as they are often taken to do, a dichotomy of passion and reason, or of emotion and form. The basic element of the Dionysiac is indeed Rausch – ‘rapture’ in Krell’s translation of Heidegger, ‘ecstasy’ in Silk and Stern – but ...”

“... were the object of great interest in this country. The discovery of the buried cities was by no means new. Interesting things had been found there as early as 1607, and sporadic digging had taken place from 1689. But it was not till 1734, when Charles III of Naples became interested in the sites, that anything like serious investigation was begun, under the ...”

“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

“... moral universe. They do what they have to do, moment by moment, to survive, even if that means abandoning or betraying or stealing from one another. They make endless misjudgments, their fear of authority figures – immigration inspectors, a doctor’s receptionist, a lollipop lady – leads them to trust the wrong people: Avtar hands over his ...”

“... of hesitation or doubt. His examples include Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Hildebrand, Samson and David. A hero of this type ‘so perfectly embodies the values of his culture that he experiences no doubts’: Achilles, for instance, is said to be motivated entirely by ‘archaic blood vengeance’. Yet the Iliad could be said to fit Ziolkowski’s model ...”

“... by contrast, sees Hopper as a philosophical artist ‘who was concerned with abstract values as a means to a figural end’. This might have surprised Hopper, who, though usually aloof, in the early 1950s joined the editorial board of the artists’ journal Reality, the purpose of which was, in Nivison’s words, ‘to preserve the existence of realism in art ...”

“... how many that would be – are almost bound to be intrigued by the book. When ‘putting down’ means trouncing or violently refuting, the book is safe, principally because one experiences no wish to do either of these things. The arguments are presented in mannerly fashion; though the writer is currently agnostic, he makes no attempt to stampede or ...”

“... and powerful friends. She had been a celebrity on What’s My Line? and lives on as the subject of David Bowie’s song ‘God Knows I’m Good’. God knows what the authorities would do to a hardened, inarticulate sneak thief from the lower classes. And even if the magistrates were in a forgiving mood, what about the shame? My grandmother had neither a lucid ...”

“... is for us to become psychotic. The Real is the McGuffin, the joker in the pack, the sign that means nothing but itself. Every signifying system, so Zizek claims, contains a kind of super-signifier whose function is just to point to the fact that the system can’t be totalised. It is that system’s point of internal fracture, marking the space where it ...”

“... of deferred repayments of an initial loan, calibrated according to income after university. But David Blunkett, the relevant minister at the time, decided that it should be imposed as an upfront charge, initially of £1000 per year. He also, in an equally ill-considered move, reduced maintenance grants. Most students felt worse off; most universities felt ...”

“... esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... you read “In Defence of Convention T”?’ The very plainness of his name (often transmuted to David Donaldson) lent an aura of mystique to the plosive economy of the Davidson corpus. And the man himself, with his startling blue eyes and precisely articulated mode of speech, his unhurried confidence, his immersion in his own vision, his neatness, certainly ...”

“... the colonial wars of a later epoch’: Cromwell had recovered Ireland by similar means, but St Domingue was too far away. French ferocity compelled blacks and mulattos to join hands, and ended in the first and best-deserved defeat of the Corsican bandit, as he was called, sometimes deservedly, by Englishmen. It was also the first successful ...”