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“... The photograph of the author on the jacket is warning enough. He is dressed all in black, poised as though ready to pounce; his eyes fix you through a cloud of smoke. The cigarette, which is positively belching fumes, is held at the precise angle guaranteed to cause the most severe nicotine staining of the fingers. This is not the author as good guy but the author as knowing addict – an adept of Burroughs’s Dr Benway and his Algebra of Total Need ...”

“... hard to come to intellectual grips with because, most of the time, we are each of us in its grip. Colin MacCabe, in 1969, was pretty much a Miranda, agog at Paris and 1968. Indeed, he was a champion of Mirandas in Cambridge, eager to make contact with ‘the brave new thoughts which seemed to circulate everywhere but in the teaching of the Faculty’. He ...”

“... The aim of this work,’ Colin MacCabe announces, ‘is not to provide the meaning of Joyce’s work but to allow it to be read.’ ‘Well, ta ever so,’ I wrote in the margin. In 1922, when Ulysses was first published and copies were burnt by the New York Post Office, or 1923, when copies were seized by the Folkestone Customs, English-reading people might have thanked Mr MacCabe for, at least, a kindly intention ...”

“... for improving the ritual status of the victim-donor, and it is entirely appropriate that Dr MacCabe should, in the outcome, have become a full professor (at the University of Strathclyde). But all that has nothing whatever to do with this book.Although it appears in a series (edited by Stephen Heath and ...”

“... is a bit of a mixed bag – shooting script, interview with Isaac Julien, diaries of Julien and Colin MacCabe, executive producer of the film – but it’s not just advertising. It gives the film a context, tells us something about its BFI and European funding, allows us to see its place in a debate and Julien’s dedication to differences which do ...”

“... English Faculty there, and who want to assess the ‘repulsiveness’ of either party, or of both, Colin MacCabe’s book on Joyce* is among the few pieces of hard evidence available. One tendency of the stories coming out of Cambridge has been to represent MacCabe as an irenic figure, peaceably intent on exploring and ...”

“... of the experience: seeing, not seeing again, or clocking the reference. It’s important, as Colin MacCabe says in Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (2003), not to turn our viewing into a guessing game. We see Godard sitting at his electric typewriter, smoking a cigar. He is murmuring titles of novels and movies, staring into space. If there is ...”

“... had a nice day out, but why must the speeches then be collected in this way? No good comes of it. Colin MacCabe tells us in his Preface that ‘it is not clear that Warhol’s prodigious output has ever been satisfactorily described, still less understood’ – which is true enough, and might be a good reason to throw a conference, to commission a ...”

“... vagrancy, a willed renunciation, rebirth into chess, guru-chasing and, inevitably, the in-tray of Colin MacCabe at the British Film Institute. Now the book (or, more accurately, John Healy himself) is everywhere; the knock-on effect, the metropolitan whispers that can rush the latest hot item from the Guardian to the heavyweight Sundays and a full ...”

“... gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit’ (LRB, 23 January 2003). Colin MacCabe, for the friends, tells us that passages of the memoir, Hitch-22, are ‘among the most affecting writing that I know in English’ (New Statesman, 17 November 2010). That’s a pungent claim and it bears repeating, or ...”

“... for most of his career pledged to beauty, and in their films together Karina personified it. In Colin MacCabe’s critical biography each of the three long chapters devoted to Godard’s film-making career has a woman’s name in its title. Each woman has not only shared a part of Godard’s life but also played an important part in his work: Anna ...”

“... of continuity. In the most useful sketch of Godard’s development to date, published in 1991, Colin MacCabe divided his life into seven schematic episodes, which could be summarised and rephrased as follows. 1. Childhood. Godard was born in Switzerland in 1930. His father was a successful doctor who ran a private clinic in Nyon, his mother a member ...”

“... 1971 edited the Cambridge structuralist pamphlet ‘Signs of the Times’ with Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, might be said to have played a small part in the assault on mimesis. Now he has tentatively and scrupulously set out to rehabilitate it. Plato argued for excluding the poets because he considered that their mimetic activities would tend to ...”

“... the market. The level of argument has been on the whole abysmal. Not since the heady days of Colin MacCabe has the press displayed its philistinism so frankly. True to its decline, the Times invited a writer from flashpulp to report. His piece was a tissue of ineptitudes. One lecturer informed the Thunderer that, if scholars spent their time ...”

“... theory, its overweening ambitiousness and vanity, the incommensurability of different theories’. Colin MacCabe refers to ‘the cultural supremacism of Leavis’. Bernard Bergonzi traces the development of Leavis’s attitude to Eliot’s poetry and criticism, and shows how Leavis used Blake and Lawrence as sticks with which to beat Eliot. ‘What ...”