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“... and youth are hard to bear.’ Youthful readers, confronted by Sophocles’ anaphrodisiac calm, may dismiss this remark as just the kind of thing an old man, having reached an unimaginable stage of drooling enfeeblement, would say. There is a difficulty of communication: Cephalus and Sophocles are themselves old (Cephalus says he can’t visit Socrates in ...”

“... like keeping horses, is one of the many things the rich can do that other people can’t. They may do it for reasons of financial prudence but if so it’s the sort of prudence that only the rich can afford. One of the girls Edna Salamon talked to met her man in a lift: ‘I told him that I was really hard up and if he wanted to go out with me he’d have ...”

“... their act together. This is more likely. Despite the mutual advantages of alliance, the coalition may founder on petty jealousies and, perhaps, on genuine ideological differences. The public may come to see it, not as a blessed escape from the extremisms of the old parties, but as yet another group of inadequate and ...”

“... of Agamemnon as rumour – though it was not a rumour but a prearranged signal. These distinctions may be too fine for Neubauer. He begins with Plutarch’s cautionary account of the fate which befell the barber of Piraeus who, learning from one of his seafaring customers that the Greek fleet had been destroyed in Sicily, rushed to inform the citizens of ...”

“... convinced: on the evidence they’d heard, Egypt seemed to have disowned him. Soon after Theresa May became home secretary in May 2010, the Home Office lost its tussle with Abu Hamza, but she was determined to be more effective in her attempts to remove citizenship – and to do it more often. In her first six months in ...”

“... been an orthodox line in Washington and Seoul: Kim Il-Sung’s invasion from the north in 1950 may have been his own idea, but Pyongyang was and is backed by Moscow, Moscow is expansive, the attack could recur, and the South must be prepared. In other words, there is a need for a garrison state. The ‘Great Leader’ in the north has sometimes seemed to ...”

“... obligation to make allowances at moments like this. But how generous should such allowances be? ‘May 24, 1980’ is a translation from the Russian into rhyming, or assonantally chiming, quatrains. It is conceivable that the word ‘nitty-gritty’ was chosen here, not just as a companion-in-rhyme for ‘city’, but because it is the ideal counterpart to ...”

“... last summer: Vol. 3, No 9.) Sexuality ‘traces that line of foam which shows just how far speech may advance on the sands of silence’. To speak of it, to ourselves, to each other, to those who hire out their ears, is, we think (or Foucault thinks we think), to reach the root of our subjectivity. That is his interest in it. Speaking of sexuality is the ...”

“... in the light of the earlier discussion, at what it is that gives value to our lives, and at how we may be able to use this knowledge to enhance and enrich them. In general, the book is written elegantly (more so than the accurate but mouth-filling title would suggest) and with humour. Glover’s views come across as committedly liberal and pluralist ...”

“... to tap deep feelings within the community, to command authority, awe or respect’. Much as we may admire Haseler’s command of rhetoric, we are given no reason why his assessment of the attitude of typical Labour voters should be preferred to that of his fellow ‘populist’ Tony Benn, who reads the electorate’s mind in diametrically opposite ...”

“... quasi-scientific attention. For a start, getting old now seems even less of a good thing than it may have done in the past. Death in secular societies is a terminus, not a gateway; we cannot redeem the impoverishments of its anteroom by thinking of them as preparation for the eternal reward. Wrinkles are harbingers of a slide to nothingness, not marks of a ...”

“... family life offends convinced single parents. Conventional villains – say, witches, dwarves – may create or confirm repulsion from the handicapped. The imperialism of Biggles, the snobbism of Blyton, lead Labour councillors to forbid them public shelf-room: Blyton, Tucker says, is the most banned author in public libraries. Then there is yet another, and ...”

“... is unthinkable without reference to the subject, and to the proposition that this calamity may be favourable to the making of poetry. Davie’s statement turns us towards Lowell with the thought that he may have been both mad and sane – a dual personality in this sense at least – and that his poetry ...”

“... It isn’t easy to talk about storytelling … Explanations only mystify. Sophisticated people may be able to explain their way out of mystification, and good luck to them, but a storyteller may well succeed in explaining his way into it which, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, is bad luck for him ...”

“... Eliot may not have been wrong in valuing ‘workshop criticism’, or criticism by poets. True, criticism as we know it consists largely of interpretation and evaluation, activities in which writer-critics have no special advantage over critics pure and simple (if the latter description will quite do for Post-Structuralists ...”