“... 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 ...”

“... different jobs. An essentially constant grammar underlies an evolution in what we say when. This may seem quite obvious, and in a way it is. But Quirk is using it to make a point about present linguistics and a suggestion about possible future linguistics. I will return to the suggestion at the end of the review. The point about present-day linguistics is ...”

“... escape the irony of this voice, as nothing is to escape the quirky vigilance of this camera. This may all sound a little fussy in description, but it flows easily on the screen, and we are a long way from the restlessness, the agitated editing of most of Scorsese’s earlier movies. These images which take us further than we ...”

“... Faced with the average book of modern literary criticism, the reviewer may wisely resolve to say nothing about the author’s skills as a writer of prose. If they ever existed, they would very likely have been dissembled, for many now believe that to write well is to act in bad faith, even to risk the charge of fascism ...”

“... of great works this is surely true. But links between early and later writing by an artist may be allowed to illuminate both. There is one very early and imperfect play by Shakespeare which may throw surprising light on the absolutely achieved and mature Hamlet, not as a source, but as in itself powered by a ...”

“... and space. A rather tetchy review of the Companion-less volumes of the Complete Works (LRB, 21 May 1987) complained at some length about the Original Spelling edition, partly because it represented what I took to be an unexplained change of editorial policy (there are arguments against such an edition, some of which the senior editor had quite recently ...”

“... liberation. While such a direct equation between literary hermeneutics and political repression may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the ...”

“... in Western Europe now seem ready to persuade us, so that regional unities of one kind of another may replace it to the general good, the tendency looks far more problematical further east. Resounding nationalism, or rather nation-statism, the two being by no means necessarily the same thing, is what presently appears to reign from Lithuania to the Black Sea ...”

“... since been treated by many as a pale shadow of the full-bodied democratic idea. After all, élites may ‘compete’ for office in elections without any very meaningful or widespread participation by the electorate, without majorities being satisfied on particular issues, or without the groups that care most intensely about particular issues getting what they ...”

“... as the repository of ideals to which all right-minded people can be presumed to subscribe. It may be that liberty, equality and fraternity can in some forms be carried to excess, and perhaps there comes a point beyond which they conflict with one another. But to be on the side of the poor and oppressed against the rich and powerful is almost by definition ...”

“... like Hedda Gabler, thinks of herself as her father’s daughter. For a hero, Alderman Roberts may be lacking in style. ‘A cautious, thrifty fellow’ is how Hugo Young describes him and it’s easy to tell he isn’t impressed. But Alfred Roberts was an imposing figure in Grantham and his businesses worked at a time when a great many failed. What we ...”

“... touch of bravado about this assertion. Rickword was in his middle twenties when he made it, and he may have thought differently before his death at the age of 84. Be that as it may, he would almost certainly have stood by the reflection with which he concluded his sentence: ‘no one,’ he said, ‘has ever changed the ...”

“... the reaction appropriate?’, ‘Was it really a shameful situation?’, and the answer may be ‘no’. However, the very content of an experience of shame is established by its general relation to shameful situations. In a world which entirely lacked shameful situations, there is no way an occupant of that world could feel shame, for there would ...”

“... and fill them with the delusion that they knew things when they did not. The Pharaoh may have had a point, but Plato was not above being perverse, especially when it came to popular culture. It is also clear that he intended the anecdote as an anecdote, not as a programme of reform. It is a commonplace that writing began through the use of ...”

“... and differences which are not differences but stereotypes is not operationally feasible. Dr May does not attempt it. He is probably right. As a clinical psychologist, he is concerned with feelings and attitudes, and a feeling or attitude which was not overdetermined by any or all of the possible sources of difference would exist on paper, like an ideal ...”