“... an interpretation rather than a given. (The best description of this theme in modern thought is Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) Derrida, in criticising ‘presence’ and ‘Western Metaphysics’, is, along with Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sellars and Quine, criticising the ‘myth of the given’ – the myth that knowledge can be ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... and the university; about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... were young and anything but discreet, sober or, for the most part, fluent in languages other than English. Many came from America’s upper echelons: Mellon, Vanderbilt, du Pont, Morgan and other robber baron families. Some, to the dismay of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, were trade unionists, socialists, Jews and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. When Hoover ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... was to find out why, in an era of melting ice, rising seas and swollen rivers, this low-lying English district, a reclaimed wetland with barely a free plot above the high-water mark on a spring tide, was still building out. Surely the barrier had been built to protect lives and existing property unluckily stranded in a climate change danger zone, not to ...”

“... So what are they interested in? Although Mrs Thatcher is an unabashed British (many would say English) nationalist, her political supremacy has not been accompanied by a new wave of patriotic histories stressing what was distinctive, cohesive and glorious about Great Britain’s past. Instead, historians from all parts of the political spectrum have ...”

“... the troubled history of hermeneutics, and some that return to an old worry of Hartman’s, the English critical style as he sees it – smooth, conversational, exhibiting a lack of original thought and self-reflection: ‘a civil art’, when Hartman feels admiring, ‘a civil jargon’ when he doesn’t. He can be stern on the subject; tea and totality ...”

“... Hamlet first broke out into soliloquy, but when he first broke into sarcastic black comedy. In English the dialogue, near the end of I.ii, runs thus: Horatio My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral. Hamlet I prithee do not mock me, fellow-student; I think it was to see my mother’s wedding. Horatio Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish ...”

“... Serge’s widow, Laurette Séjourné, insisted that no unpublished material existed. I asked Richard Greeman, his principal translator and founder of the Victor Serge Foundation, what the story was. Séjourné, he explained,had them in her possession but kept them hidden. She denied this to me, to Susan Weissman and even to Serge’s ...”

“... on. I take the ‘I’ as referring, truthfully, to Gillian Clarke and issuing as directly as the English language allows from her apportioned experience. So it makes a difference if belief is strained or affronted, if I lose confidence in the validity of what she says. It is a mark of Gillian Clarke’s poetry that she prefers to perceive things rather than ...”

“... he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of English, and his consistently affectionate and trustful relationship with Ernest Jones (the Welshman who went about in a sort of honorary yarmoulka), as well as his conventional dislike of America, are dealt with at great length. The story of Freud’s friendship ...”

“... who’ve been programmed to adopt a style of play based on the long-ball game prevalent in the English leagues about ten years ago. That’s why great players like Lampard and Gerrard suddenly look like they’ve been drafted in from Howard Wilkinson’s Sheffield Wednesday. And the accompanying thought: where are the real England team? Who’s keeping ...”