“... truth has sometimes been described as the idea of the infinite imprisoned within the finite. It may be less contentiously characterised as the belief that the capabilities and the demands of the self are disproportionate to its circumstances,’ The reason this agreeable solution to the problem of solidarity is so hard to attain and maintain is precisely ...”

“... Their aim is scattershot, but they do have some ammunition. The first decade of the 21st century may have been the hottest on record, but global temperatures did not get significantly hotter in the course of the decade as they had in the 1980s and 1990s. There are several possible explanations for this, one of which is the protective effect of sulphate ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... of Theory as it has influenced literary study in the last few decades. The settling of accounts may be timely, given that so many ‘new approaches’ have run out of steam. But the real test of the book comes in the chapter called ‘Touching Reading’, which goes beyond survey-mode and argues for a style of criticism that is alert to touch and tact. The ...”

“... places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less difficult. It may be said that it’s to do with German idealist philosophy, with political ...”

“... have often wondered whether Borges’s Funes, so uncannily similar to Luria’s Mnemonist, may have been based on a personal encounter with such a mnemonist’, he muses in a footnote to Mr Thompson’s story. ‘Funes the Memorious’ is the story of someone inexplicable and astounding: ‘A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, lozenge ...”

“... social relation, and father-daughter intercourse was not recognised as incest.Whatever the rules may be, Godelier says, all the people covered by them are considered in some essential way too close to one another – too alike, in short – for sex between them to be socially, eugenically or cosmically permissible. Usually this ‘too-closeness’ is ...”

“... two more essay-collections before his death, but now we have two posthumous volumes, and there may be more to come. Considering the ever-increasing density and strangeness of his work, and its ever-increasing fame, it would take a very tough dean to say de Man had under-produced.The corpus is now augmented by a volume he would not himself have wanted to ...”

“... a critic who had something of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a ...”

“... and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone): ‘Only Newton’s laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many possible avenues of research are being ...”

“... in an idiom and pressing it to the limit – makes it easy to decide exactly what the artists may have understood by the fields they made, and why the belonging or not-belonging of a creature to any one of them counted for so much. It’s hard enough to find words to specify the various kinds of containment, or belonging together, or intricate totality we ...”

“... of the Altars and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700, may be written from different ideological positions, yet will imply a similar historical picture. The world they describe is one of political confusion, religious bewilderment and personal danger. Shakespeare’s parents and grandparents lived through three major ...”

“... useful in reminding us of all Auerbach had done before he came to his best-known book. We may say the same of Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1929), reprinted in 2007 – Said thinks this is ‘in some ways … his most exciting and intense work’. And then there is Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, containing six of Auerbach’s later ...”

“... has already taken seven years to negotiate and isn’t yet complete, and even this arrangement may prove too burdensome and restrictive for the more red-blooded Brexiters. Obama suggested that a similar sort of treaty with the US might take ten years to negotiate. Matt Ridley, a vice-president of Vote Leave and author of The Rational Optimist, argued in ...”

“... lingering from that implied stress on the ‘I’ before ‘all-forgotten’. The spirit may now be passing away from love, leaving the friendly room for the last time, or, as the syntax suggests, she may have passed away from love in the first place. In any event, being dead means learning to live with your own ...”