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“... Emancipation involves escape, but having got out of the Victorian prison, what then? The new world may seem wholly delightful, like Blake’s Beulah or Keats’s Chamber of Maiden Thought, or the land of sexual intercourse we entered in 1963, so why not stay in it for ever? Somewhere at the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing ...”

“... labour on De Quincey has anything much to do with taking him to be an important writer. Barrell may well think him that, but is almost entirely preoccupied with establishing that even though De Quincey was quite good at doing so, he understands rather better the way one thing bears on another. De Quincey used the noun ‘involute’, borrowed from ...”

“... good ones; the hacks sometimes making a better job of it.’ It’s a valuable point. But a reader may find it difficult not to stop and wonder whether this distinguished novelist ranks himself with the gifted who can’t or with the hacks who can. A commonsensical distinction doesn’t seem to work from the inside. There is something in common between ...”

“... other crimes, including doing barely credible damage to the Duke of Norfolk’s deer-park – he may have thought it was Buckingham’s – twice breaking into Combe Abbey to steal its goods and insult the abbot, and repeatedly mustering large numbers of armed men to lead in theft, raid, or riot. High points of his career include breaking out of prison at ...”

“... genetics, and enthusiastic about the potential benefits. On occasion, however, this enthusiasm may have more to do with the pure excitement of the science than with any very clear practical consequences in the foreseeable future. The most commonly heard justification of the billions currently being spent on the Human Genome Project is that it will lead to ...”

“... an entryist organisation, a Militant Tendency of the Gospel. The analogy with Trotskyist sects may be unfair. Christian socialists do not meet secretly, do not act as a caucus, do not form a party within a party – or not as far as we know. Nor do they have the doctrinal stridency, the ideological unity and the monolithic structure of neo-Leninist ...”

“... secret compartments and false bottoms. The two contending schools of literary interpretation today may be compared to two sorts of baggage inspector. The first simply searches your belongings for signs that you are who you say you are; the second is more concerned to establish your guilt by planting some offending item upon you. On the one hand are the ...”

“... us to make the right predictions, and none of the other stances would work so well. Sceptics may (and do) deny this fact, but here is a small-scale demonstration of how the intentional stance appears to be built into our modes of understanding. Suppose I tell you: ‘When Alice found Bill in bed with Christine, she took the ring off her finger and flung ...”

“... all aspire to look as much like each other as possible. To foxhunters, each set of half a dozen may elaborate an excitingly different narrative of the multiple events that intervene between a view and a kill, but to the uninitiated, one print of hunting or shooting is barely distinguishable from another, and all seem to mean exactly the same ...”

“... twenty years, but had not yet published. ‘So all my originality,’ he wrote, ‘whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.’ History, however, has been kinder to Darwin than he feared, and it is Wallace who has been relegated to the footnotes. In fact, what was in many ways Wallace’s finest hour may paradoxically ...”

“... with the tedious but mildly pressing problems of the Irish electorate’. Douglas Hurd may not yet be bored, but he would have difficulty in bettering the description of the problems he is facing. So few of them have changed, or have been solved. Part of the difficulty, indeed, is that the nature of the original solution was that it could be ...”

“... Hoy indeed goes further than this, and suggests that Derrida’s obstinate dedication to ambiguity may cause him to fall, irretrievably, between two stools. ‘We could decide his texts were neither literature nor philosophy, nor anything else.’ For someone who is more keenly aware of being adrift in the ‘sea of texts’, this categorical judgment is hard ...”

“... reveal that he has used English, French, Polish, Latin, German, Russian and Ukrainian sources. He may rightly say that his work is more up-to-date than The Cambridge History of Poland, edited by W. J. Reddaway and produced in 1941-50. The title of his work, God’s Playground, is perhaps not a very happy translation of the Polish expression Boze Igrzysko, but ...”

“... sobriety, unfailing contentment … Gargantua, Prologue, translated by J.R. Cohen Rabelais, too, may be compared to a Silenus. His big book is not unlike that little box painted with grotesques. Whether the comic exterior conceals a serious message – the marrow of the bone – has been a matter of controversy from his day to ours. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... Heavy Dancers is in certain ways an important and revealing document, even if in ways the author may not have intended. Although he has made no self-conscious effort to do so, Thompson has managed to suggest a great deal here about how the peace movement has gained its strength and how it may, in the course of things, lose ...”