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“... Major John Wesley Powell’s pioneer navigation of the Canyon in 1869, the less committed among us may reflect that these approved ways of seeing the place are extremely time-consuming, and require the setting aside of three or more days of one’s time, and the advance booking of guides, livestock or equipment. That ...”

“... be kept glowing if not with the secularist hot air which he and Cowling jointly despise. Cowling may well reply that the second and ‘larger’ work which he promises will set out all these matters. If so, it will have a hard time. At the end of this volume, at any rate, it is clear that Cowling’s thoughts, when they extract themselves from the activities ...”

“... conflict, and how relevant some of the ideas and attitudes involved still are. A word of warning may be in place. Professor Pagels often sets these Gospels, Secret Books, Epistles, Revelations (following her I shall refer to them collectively as Gospels) in parallel with the canonical Gospels – rightly, in a sense, since this is what the Gnostics ...”

“... pieces of legislation, such as the Berne Convention, do not even venture to define what ‘work’ may be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any ...”

“... pompous and deranged. Talking badly in this way also becomes a way of not really thinking: we may, for example, call Parliament a ‘soap opera’ simply because we are staggeringly uninterested in what is happening in our own seat of government. Calling something ‘operatic’ is our way of avoiding finding out about it. Opera sits at the centre of a ...”

“... of the arrogance of the strong and the shame of the weak, defeated Germans. The name of Hitler may not get much prominence in the book, the Nazi Party would figure only in the stories – some of them harrowing – of the ignorance of Allied efforts to de-Nazify school-teachers and censor school books, of arbitrary arrests of apparently innocent citizens ...”

“... situation, and the need to insist on the absurdity of the absurd. Horror and meaninglessness may be frequent, even banal, but we are lost if we treat them as normal, as all there is: if we abandon our anger at the affront they offer to reason. If our normality helps us to struggle, our rage may help us to survive. But ...”

“... escamotage, in the interest of ease, and of the abysmal public naivety, becomes inevitable. You may multiply the little facts that may be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like – the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its essence the whole effect is as naught: I mean the ...”

“... are busy but the sender is absent. These situations occur again and again in Kafka. And, though we may not like to admit it, elsewhere too. There are also some great not-quite parables in the selection: If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, that would have been allowed. The crows claim that a single crow could destroy ...”

“... what is’. Words cannot penetrate the intricate texture of things, however seductively they may evoke it. At the same time, language has its own textures and metamorphic properties, which may reflect the world but must not be confused with it. It is Peck’s least Poundian characteristic that provides the key to his ...”

“... a signal contribution to our understanding of how science works and what it achieves. Scientists may be good at running science, but nobody understands very well how it works. Our best models of how they test their theories have absurd consequences – the idea, for example, that every observation is evidence for every theory – and our accounts of where ...”

“... aware can provide, in spite of themselves, insights into their own unreliable mental states, which may or may not be rooted in events which may or may not have happened. Aesthetes like Freddie Montgomery want to be a separate species, above human ...”

“... stories told by Gerd Gigerenzer. The sales of a company fall by 50 per cent between January and May. Between May and September sales increase by 60 per cent. Is the company in better shape in September than it was in January? Down by 50 per cent and up by 60 per cent sounds to many people like an overall 10 per cent ...”

“... the veil of what we could possibly know, is a humble admission that our best efforts to understand may well fail to grasp how the world is. Claiming truth is the way we take on the risk of radical human fallibility. A central task of philosophy, for MacIntyre, is to grasp this vulnerability and make it explicit. It is not that we can somehow stand outside our ...”

“... exclamations in The Tempest or Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. Experiences of wonder may be by definition rare, but for Fisher they are dispersed all over the map of knowledge. He is particularly severe with Romantics like Keats, and the whole gloomy procession of disenchantment theorists, who accuse modern science of murdering wonder and regard ...”