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“... Just the sort of thing students are being encouraged these days to ask of the literature they read. Criticism in the spirit of the FDA is intended to reduce your tolerance for golden oldies, to reveal consumer fraud going on in books that for these many years have had a reputation for supplying hard-to-get nutrients. Illusions as to the value of revered ...”

“... had since Franco.’ Anyone interested in the bewildering trajectory of Spanish socialism should read Richard Gillespie’s history of the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español or PSOE), appropriately subtitled ‘A History of Factionalism’. It is a remarkable work of research and scholarship which chronicles the entire saga, from the ...”

“... it’s obvious that Camus, who knew a lot about guilt, was aware of this. So those of us who read La Peste as a straightforward allegory were being both too clever and too simple-minded – which goes for Sartre as well. A third myth, still current, is that Camus was an existentialist. This is partly an offshoot of his being so often coupled with ...”

“... cause and espousing tritheism. As a philosopher, he was most remarkable – as the title of Richard Sorabji’s splendid book indicates – for his rejection of various parts of the dominant Aristotelian view of the physical universe. According to Aristotle, the heavens are made of ‘ether’, a fifth element distinct from the four sublunary stuffs ...”

“... his spare time to the study of Marxism-Leninism. When he went to university, typically he chose to read for two degrees – one in mathematics, the other in literature – and as a star pupil of the regime, was awarded a Stalin Prize. It even appears that a film was made about him. But private life was subordinated to public ambition: his courtship of fellow ...”

“... The other evening several of us dined together at the officers’ club and afterwards we went and read Racine out loud. Colonel Reyniers, a particularly charming and cultivated Frenchman, told me how he had read all Racine out loud to his wife and I remembered how I used to inflict him on you. Colonel Reyniers has five ...”

“... forgo much of what they already have, including the conventional expectation that the reason to read great literature is to find things that are transportable, things they can carry away with them. Not a chance. At the beginning of the last of the three lectures, he points out how precious little his interpretations have yielded by way of those facts and ...”

“... Each generation fashions its own image of Richard II. To his contemporaries, Richard’s fate was an admonitory instance of changing fortune: the King fell in the midst of his glory and was delivered into the hands of his enemies. To historians of the Tudor age, Richard’s deposition by one of his subjects was a terrible warning of the dangers of rebellion, bequeathing to succeeding generations a legacy of bloodshed and civil strife ...”

“... reading this novel, I was brought to the unmannerly edge of bewildered laughter by exchanges that read like borrowings from Basil Fawlty. Here, for example, Feng, ‘director of political work at the ministry, a conservative’, is in dispute with Ho, ‘an honest outspoken official’:   ‘I think you’re completely mistaken. Your view is ...”

“... It is not easy to determine which is the better book. Richard Burton was printed by Butler and Tanner Limited, Peter Sellers by the Fakenham Press, and since the one establishment is in Somerset and the other in Norfolk, it is fair to absolve both of them from the sort of catchpenny opportunist hustling which these days has the publishing world of London by the throat ...”

“... I was also low. For years, I’d translated a distaste for the Derridean writings I’d tried to read into scorn, and had passed this on to others even less aware of his work than me. I’d thought he was a faker – a fumiste, a smoke-artist – though even his murky, staccato texts were streaked with brilliant passages which should have alerted me to ...”

“... intellectual grasp, the one who has been able to penetrate, to understand. But then Virgil had read him more acutely and more intently than anyone had done: the Georgics as a whole is saturated in Lucretius’ influence. Why was philosophy of such quality, presented in such magnificent dress, so entirely neglected as philosophy? The obvious answer seems to ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... done’ together with those who confine themselves to ‘demure civic conversation in the style of Richard Rorty’s ironist’. Most people who warn that Postmodernist relativisms are endangering all that we hold dear reject most of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Plato and Kant. Williams endorses most of them. There were few kind words for Plato in Shame and ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”