“... face. My mate Fergus sniggered. He said she had funny wee shoes and legs. I have a feeling she may not remember how the conversation went, but I recorded it for posterity in the back of a school jotter the next day. The Queen: ‘Very hot, isn’t it?’ Fergus: ‘Roastin’.’ The Queen: ‘And have you been cub scouts ...”

“... badly equipped to compete with video games called things like ‘Wasp Attack IV’. Such games may be hard on the fusebox, but pale children everywhere love them, spending hours out of the sun in the clammy domain of the upstairs boxroom, where each child can become commander-in-chief of a private army of killer insects, which they happily send out in ...”

“... and conflict: isn’t one the flipside of the other? No, Queller and Strassmann say: a system may display a lot of co-operation and a lot of conflict at the same time. Human societies are like this. What co-operation means here is, roughly speaking, co-operation in maintaining a system’s structure and pattern of activity, using sources of energy and ...”

“... your Prospero.Marsyas was flayed for not knowing his place. Harrison has been luckier: school may not have accommodated his talent (‘He possesses something of the poetical imagination,’ his final report said, ‘but suffers from the waywardness of that gift’), but he put it to use, eventually making his way from Leeds to Broadway.He was helped by ...”

“... The Gulag Archipelago. Then there is the difference, perhaps less important than it may at first seem, that Tolstoy’s work, despite its research base and the 160 historical figures among its characters, has made-up characters too and passes as fiction, whereas all Slezkine’s characters are real people who lived in the elite House of ...”

“... beginning to wonder whether the high-tech, jargoned, reader-alienating image of the modern product may not have some disadvantages. Of course it can be argued that there can be no going back, the old criticism having been declared intellectually deluded, dishonest and collusive with political authoritarianism. ‘With the advent of Post-Structuralism and the ...”

“... the elegant public festivals and balls with which costumed Florentines welcomed the first day of May, celebrated princely marriages, and forwarded requests for dates (when these were made by gentlemen of standing to ladies of high position, the government cleared the streets to let the floats, pages, and ever-burning hearts go by on their way to the lady’s ...”

“... sums up what happens to plays, like Shakespeare’s, that outlast their own time – and what may now be happening to his own: What keeps the classical plays alive is the use made of them, even if it’s misuse. In the schoolroom morals are squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains ...”

“... entirely taken up with psychoanalytic concerns. Sometimes it seems that they hardly know what may happen in real life and fear it accordingly. On the night of the New York black-out in 1965 someone I know was with his analyst. As the lights went out the analyst – not the patient – jumped out of his chair and shouted: ‘They’re coming to get ...”

“... proclaim ‘Power to the people’ in making usage the only criterion of whether something may be said, there is then for them an immediate opening-up of rich new possibilities of authority and authoritarianism. For who is to tell the people how the people are (is?) using their (its?) immense language except the indispensable new class of panoptic ...”

“... just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a penis-envy which may be sublimated into some vague desire for intellectual achievement but which can only be allayed by bearing a child, preferably male, as phallus? If H.D. dreamt of a princess stepping down towards water, to find and protect a baby, while she stood by as ...”

“... If a recently dead husband had been leading a secret life, then telling the widow a sweet lie may forestall even greater misery, but if she really wants to know the truth, no matter how bitter, the lie wrongs her. Utilitarianism can be at odds with our moral intuitions. Sidgwick’s ‘great, drab book’, as Parfit calls it, argued nevertheless that ...”

“... fierce because Descartes was at bottom aware that one can’t rule out the possibility that matter may be conscious. Many of the false naturalists, by contrast, have no such doubts. Some of them will deny this. They will insist that they do admit the existence of consciousness or experience, and do allow that it can be physical. But they do this by changing ...”

“... The late Angela Carter once told me I was a ‘formalist’. We didn’t meet often, and this may have been the first time we did, in which case it was at a party. It had slipped my mind that I don’t smoke, and I cadged a cigarette off her in exchange for reciting the first sentence of one of her novels (‘On my last night in London I paid you a small ...”

“... men performing public roles. An artist who found his work in the king’s collection, though he may have seen it lost from public view, was not in the pay of a private individual. As Cowen points out, the great era of private patronage is the present day, when unheard-of numbers of private individuals are able to contribute something to artistic ...”