“... that we want is discussion, and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be.’ In Liberal vision, the lamp of reason blazes forth to scatter the forces of tradition, obscurantism, convention, violence, deceit, formality, Medieval superstition and unearned privilege. Many of these forces were seen as lurking within the Tory ...”

“... have the Russian tanks rolling out onto the streets as they did in 1953. What they have achieved may well be far more than Gorbachev bargained for. But there is clearly no going back now. The East German people have made it clear that they will not be satisfied until they have gained freedom to travel, freedom of economic choice, and freedom of ...”

“... English generation has done something to defend and broaden that freedom. Lack of this heritage may not be a fault of the Germans, but it is a fact, and one which has more and more evil results in every generation. Therefore German liberals, to achieve anything, would have to fight much harder than we need. The basic issue is whether the German Left were ...”

“... are needed by the West as the ‘other’, a blank slate to be inscribed, in order that we may construct what we ourselves are. The second half of the book concerns feminist studies in primatology. It is a series of essays about women primatologists’ attempts to counteract the masculinist presentation of apes grouped round dominant males, in ...”

“... Eastern countries history has become a joke, this precious beam of light upon a precious detail may be of some help to the next investigator.’ These Selected Letters are not so inveterately rude as I have made them seem, by quoting their author only at his most destructively (and quotably) imperious. Nabokov can be supportive too, and charming, with the ...”

“... so much as through contact with other people working in different fields. A breakthrough may depend on a scientist’s ‘accidental hearing from colleagues about facts in some quite different field outside his province and comparing the latter with the former’. On the level of individual perception, Davie reminds us, this principle is at the core ...”

“... to thumbnail nightmares, and certainly that darkness is visible, in poems like ‘Another Cold May’, ‘The Suicide’, ‘The Grey Ones’, and ‘Charon’. But may not a gloomy poem be a positive act? MacNeice thought so, thought that ‘a poem in praise of suicide is an act of homage to life.’ So did that other ...”

“... image for his poem ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ – ‘Some burn damp faggots, others may consume/The entire combustible world in one small room’ – from a letter Henry James wrote him in 1915, contrasting the poet, ‘who can be present, and so present, by a simple flicker of your genius’, with the ‘clumsier race’ of novelists who have ...”

“... real feeling for language, and no more had Priestley: which makes one wonder whether popularity may not be associated with taking communication for granted, not making a style of one’s own, but using a common vernacular so widely received as to sound already reassuringly obsolete. Making it new was not their thing, and their sales thrived on not doing ...”

“... published) is often absent from the English edition, or else it is incorrect or incomplete. One may think that it does not make a huge difference to know that Bataille never published Madame Edwarda under his own name, contrary to what the Publisher’s Note in this edition tells us. And yet the fact that in 1956 Bataille published a solemn celebratory ...”

“... they approached the 1987 election, for the failure to break through in 1983 had been crucial. This may simply have been too cruel to accept, for there was no doubt that the old electoral order – the old mould, if you like – was fragile. The temptation to believe in the politics of One More Heave was understandable enough.Crewe and King have performed a ...”

“... module countenances relations between minds and things-that-don’t-exist. It may be that only phenomena in the domain of the commonsense-psychology module exhibit this logical peculiarity; philosophers think so who hold that ‘intentionality’ is the mark of the mental. In similar spirit, Chomsky thinks that the grammatical structures ...”

“... taboos. It is difficult to believe that this, or anything else, escaped van Onselen’s notice. It may be that this world remained truly impenetrable, even to him, but it seems more likely that a wish to protect Kas may have stopped him writing about these matters. In the course of the 17 years that he spent researching and ...”

“... in her father’s world, competing with girlfriends, work and any other yet unborn children he may father. With mother it’s easier: when Mary finds herself pregnant by a sweet but useless hippy boyfriend, Jane (12 by now) announces that she doesn’t want a little brother, and Mary obediently has an abortion. We’re told Jane cherishes her guilt, years ...”

“... the doctors who supported the ‘new German science of healing’ at a meeting in Nuremberg in May 1935 did so because they opposed what they called ‘alienation from nature’. By the time David Brower turned up, a large segment of the Western world was ready for a practical and friendly philosophy prepared to make the best of technology and human ...”