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“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mallarmé’s ‘seigneur latent qui ne peut devenir’ – had long attracted Segalen, who may or may not have seen something of that broodingly estranged son in himself, as he fought to escape from the orbit of an interfering mother, and was quick to find real-life Hamlets in faraway courts, notably that of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wisdom implied in that absurdity was, of course, that no generation can comprehend how history may characterise major events that occur during its lifetime. While one cannot place the current scene in the context of what may occur in the next few years, however, there is still a widespread feeling – often encysted in ...”

“... ideas as Wittgenstein’s of language games and Austin’s of how to do things with words. But, it may be felt, Phillips’s use, for example, of the idea of words ‘doing something’, as in ‘Symptoms’, the second essay in Terrors and Experts, is not Austin’s, as when we find there: ‘It is always worth wondering, as a prelude to a case-presentation ...”

“... contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object.’ Love and hate – a too simple vocabulary, and so never quite the right names – are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; they are ...”

“... When you have bid your servant once adieu. Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, nor your affairs suppose, But like a sad slave sit and think of naught Save where you are how happy you make those. So true a fool is love, that in your will, Though you do anything, he thinks no ill. Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply ...”

“... Brutus’ name from his speech entirely’, Cicero says, before going on to hint that the omission may have had something to do with the fact that Brutus’ mother, Servilia, was sleeping with Caesar. Their relationship led to the rumour (which can’t be true) that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son. Caesar​ began his campaigns in Gaul the following ...”

“... Reading The Cypress Box made her ‘oblivious to the world’. She found her voice, as Larkin may have found his through reading Hardy and knowing Kingsley Amis, and when Gumilev returned he was deeply impressed by what she had written. She had become a better poet than he, and though their marriage was ill-assorted and unhappy, and was to end in divorce ...”