“... but these coinages strike me as coy and opportunistic. Hartman, who is always in earnest, may associate these punnings with what he analyses in Coleridge as a ‘learned or playful yet always compulsive manipulation of words ... linked ... to his quest for unity in all areas of life’ (in another essay he has some searching and sceptical remarks on ...”

“... would hang all too precariously in the air. What about the good will? The feminist anthropologists may not be inclined to forgive the ruses. The feminist scholars have no need to accept her conclusions about Papuan women not being exploited by the men, for they are entitled to define exploitation as they see it, in relation to their practical intentions. But ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... America, girls could have a harmonious and sexually-free adolescence. Mead’s field material may well have been crude and her conclusions overdrawn. But so, one might argue, is Grosskurth’s espousal of Freeman’s fuzzy idea of ‘phylogenetically-given impulses’ which underlie culture. Her accusation that Mead was a gullible innocent who ‘acquired ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer ...”

“... where the author is so hard on his characters that the reader wants to leap to their defence: it may embarrass male readers, making them uneasy about their own fatherhood and sonship. Nevertheless, despite the grimness, Sir Denis often refreshes the imagination with enlivening accounts of what was, to all seeming, a happy and enviable boyhood. The book is ...”

“... is that a biography showing that Nancy Reagan isn’t a very nice woman is besides the point. She may have been and probably was a bad mother to her children. She may have indulged in lesbian practices at Smith, and been an expert at oral sex in Hollywood. Perhaps she did have a long-running affair with Frank ...”

“... myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these ‘dark images and acts’ and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous ...”

“... woman can become pregnant from a sexual encounter, but a man cannot.’ The men in Road to Divorce may be presented through the filter of modern notions like these: but it seems to me that as far as the women go, Stone has bought an entirely contemporary version of events and feelings. The women in this book are creatures of late 18th and early 19th-century ...”

“... passion to keep its romantic soul without legislating political correctness. Today the French may be insecure about their cultural role in an expanding Europe, but they are still just as willing and eager to accept, nurture and make one of their own every American castaway from Jerry Lewis to La Toya Jackson. Paris, if not paradise, is the nearest thing ...”

“... best. This has happened to the new British Library, which belongs stylistically to the Sixties and may not be fully functioning even in the mid-Nineties. Such effects, common to all arts, are emphasised in architecture. Buildings are unavoidably present; a book can go to the stacks for a generation but the ups and downs of a building’s reputation are ...”

“... garden of ideas sets off on a long decline towards the floral clock – which the digital watch may eventually render obscure in its turn. But though the editors comment regretfully on the increasing alienation of modern life, the contemporary parks that they include, Disneyland and the spectacular switchback at Valencia, are indications that although we ...”

“... into exile to avoid execution. Some readers rightly admire Socrates’s moral convictions; others may find them pointlessly rigid; everyone ought to find them puzzling. It is even more puzzling that he claims to have found a rational defence of his convictions through the sorts of cross-examination that we find in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates conducts ...”