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“... way of knowing whether individual torturers seek an ‘uncontestable’ power in their work. Some may, others are conscripted peasant youths who receive pay and privileges for work in support of a regime they trust. Many people, though not all, will torture in response to the orders of authorities they habitually accept and even revere, as Stanley Milgram’s ...”

“... on the artist. Why this should be is a teasing question. I am inclined to think that the answer may be banal, not to say dull. We learn most, perhaps, from those commentators who unveil concrete links and echoes in the utterances of the past. A formal analysis, however subtle, confirms what we have half-intuited anyway: but a thorough historical study ...”

“... last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to Shakespeare, may be applied here, by one whose sole privilege is in a grateful admiration, to Walter Savage ...”

“... of his old boss. Thatcherism was always an aberration from the norm of advanced capitalism. Major may not know how to get back to the mainstream but I shall be astonished if he does not try. On the left, Bennite siege socialism and even Bevanite Clause Four utopianism have disappeared without trace. Labour is now a social-democratic party, committed to a ...”

“... Take a sample of current and Recent theorists, chosen with an eye to having as little in common as may be: Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, or Chomsky, or Piaget, or Saussure, or Dewey or any cognitive scientist you like, to say nothing of such contemporary philosophers as Davidson, Dennett, Rorty and Quine. You may choose ...”

“... sometimes emotionally urgent style which invites us to get close to what these long dead teachers may have had at heart. Hellenistic philosophy is often called ‘post-Aristotelian’ philosophy, and Nussbaum takes Aristotle (who died a year after Alexander) as the starting-point, setting out his ethical outlook as a kind of bench-mark. She claims for him, as ...”

“... Many celebrations were planned and held, not only in Philadelphia, where the framers had met from May to September in 1787, but in many American cities, large and small. The point of these ceremonial events was not only to recall a moment in the nation’s past but also to educate the public about the meaning and value of the Constitution. None of these ...”

“... direct their helpful behaviour towards relatives, then the genes associated with altruism may spread, because they are present in the beneficiaries and transmitted to their offspring; or if today’s altruist is tomorrow’s recipient, the present loss may be made up with interest. Models of kin selection and ...”

“... eructation to be heard in the by now extensive library of Oulipian production, the items of which may have their makers’ names attached to them but are without exception scrupulously unrevealing of any psychic quiddity. The Oulipo’s few, hospitable rules, moreover, were drawn up so as to make it clear from the start that this literary grouping would be ...”

“... version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be read. Nothing said about Ulysses seems to spoil it. But Finnegans Wake lacks this imperturbability: it seems to demand to be read in one way, and nobody knows what the way is. Obstinate rather than patient, it holds out against every effort of good ...”

“... each kind of novel embodies a different habit of nomenclature. And where names are bestowed, they may also be artfully concealed or withheld. The greatest of all novels begins with a hero of disputed name in a small village of La Mancha which the author refuses to name. Lawrence Durrell’s Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale concludes a sequence consisting of ...”

“... he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that you ‘are not the principal character’, but you can’t help sounding like it when you use such a locution as ‘when I and Sean White took him to Dublin Castle’. After you ... Likewise the author of Purity of Diction in English ...”

“... that a professionalised academic discipline stands for.’ Quite so. The legacy of Rorty’s work may lie principally in the manner of its saying, in the display by a philosopher educated in the analytical tradition of the ambitions and the gentler tactics of the deconstructionists. Like Derrida, whom he admires, Rorty attacks established philosophy and its ...”

“... nothing in the night-time. But on the whole Holmes’s clues are objects, particularly those that may be detected through a magnifying-glass: Holmes’s glass is almost as famous as his deerstalker cap. Some of the clues, although solid, must be described as transparent too. There is often a largeness, as well as innocence, about these minutiae which ...”

“... predecessors, they can perform the tasks for which they are militarily adequate (whatever these may be) for desirable or undesirable ends. But unlike most of their predecessors’, their destructive character is so utterly appalling that the prospect of their being in fact used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and ...”