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“... again what is striking is not the new achievement but the new self-admiring rhetoric. Is it the case, he asks, that there is a general belief in the obvious (traditional, authoritarian) single meaning of a text, a belief which must therefore be demystified and deconstructed? No, few hold such an opinion; what is being demystified anew is merely the old ...”

“... when he was being trundled onto a public platform – literally or metaphorically – to argue the case for Distributism v. Socialism or Catholicism v. Eugenics. Of all forms of human expression, polemic is surely the most ephemeral. His famous rumpuses with the likes of Shaw, Dean Inge, H.G. Wells and Co now seem dead, only enlivened – as in his marvellous ...”

“... it as a series of bad but sub-evil acts. But this doesn’t seem to get us much further. In the case of torture, for instance, the idea that evil is extraordinary badness doesn’t explain anything, at least if one seeks some feature of the act to mark it off from mere misdemeanours. Nonetheless, it may be right to say that doing evil is doing something ...”

“... orthodoxy was central to the poem and those who detected unorthodox energies everywhere. C.S. Lewis admired the poem for its ‘mere Christianity’ and William Empson thought Milton should be honoured for the unsparing philosophical honesty of his exploration, an honesty which necessarily ended by exposing the weakness of the ...”

“... and Stella. As a result of its timing, literary histories have often consigned it to what C.S. Lewis memorably and damnably called ‘the drab age’. Sidney and Spenser did two important things to English poetry, neither of which would help the reputation of Gascoigne. The first was to create a critical climate in which (ideally at least) every single ...”

“... by someone called Francis Schaeffer. I read Pascal and G.K. Chesterton and Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. I became interested in the philosophy of religion and in exegetical criticism. I heard about a place called L’Abri, in Switzerland – a kind of religious teaching community. That sounded good. The woman who lent me the books, and the couple I was ...”

“... come they are almost immortal?’, or to use Martianus Capella’s term, borrowed by C.S. Lewis, longaevi. Perhaps they weren’t human after all. Once again there was a hardline view: they were spirits, and since they weren’t angels they must be devils, which meant that those who believed in elf queens dancing in green meadows – in the words of a ...”

“... the great émigré artists whom early 20th-century England attracted, were cosmopolitan enough to cast a quizzical eye on Western assumptions. Ambiguity, that is, went hand in hand with anthropology. Malinowski contributed an appendix to The Meaning of Meaning, and Richards writes in his Principles of Literary Criticism of the extreme cultural relativity of ...”

“... the Journal suggest Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, which have been said by Rupert Brooke and C.S. Lewis to be about beetles. ‘It is always easier to obey if you dare not disobey. German women are to their lords like so many black beetles’: John Butler Yeats (father of the poet and of the painter Jack B. Yeats) was aware that people had a propensity to see ...”

“... have gone off rather at half-cock. Nietzsche is the first in that field: the rest nowhere. Wyndham Lewis was in his own way a disciple of Nietzsche, but in a style that spoils the purity of the original. Like all ‘no-nonsense’ writers he depends none the less upon the impact of style, which inevitably goes off on its own, creating its own object, a picture ...”

“... what might be called the lower middle class’ by sheer hard work and resolved at whatever cost to themselves to provide their children with a decent education. Alexander was accordingly put into the kindergarten department of a public school (Scottish sense), where he received rapid preferment – ‘more, I fear, because of my physical size than my ...”

“... in the dangerous pursuit of copper and other minerals. The Devon Great Consols polluted streams, cast up slag heaps and once supplied world markets with half of their arsenic. Even as a studiously rumpled bohemian, Morris served as one of its directors, buying a top hat for meetings, which he defiantly crushed when his term ended. Marlborough and Exeter ...”

“... take pictures.There’s not a soul in the ante-chapel as Richard LM had warned would be the case, though the chapel itself is full. Rupert is in the next stall and Rowan Williams slips in beyond him in his capacity as master of Magdalene. Comforting presence though he is, this means I will be preaching (sic) a few feet along from the ex-archbishop of ...”

“... poetry and belief, at the time of Empson’s return from China; this fashion, led by such as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to ...”

“... The small rain down can rain? Christ that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. C.S. Lewis used to say that it was his wife he was thinking of, not his mistress or girlfriend, otherwise he would most likely have written ‘in her bed again’. However that may be, the point is that de la Mare and Stevie Smith and Anon are all appealing to us over ...”