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“... What is the point of prophets, and of prophecy? Not, it seems, to impart useful advance information about the future. One of the most irritating things about claims made for premonitions and other alleged forms of foresight is that they never seem to contain anything specific enough – the winner of the 4.30 at Lingfield, say, or whether it will be a white Christmas – for anyone to make practical use of them ...”

“... There can be no new reader, and therefore perhaps no wholly new reading of the collection of stories known as The Arabian Nights. Not because they have been exhausted by retelling and explication, but because we always seem to have encountered them, or some of them, already, somewhere else, at some other time in our lives we are not able quite to pin down ...”

“... to their namesakes in ancient Greece and Rome. Yet this is precisely the gamble taken by Steven Connor in his new history of ventriloquism. Connor is a professor in the academic rather than the theatrical line – a Professor of Modern Literature and Theory – and has already written reassuring books on ...”

“... verbs such as ‘to know’ become questionable and sometimes even disappear from his writing. As Steven Connor points out in his admirable if uncompromising study,* Beckett is concerned to contest our very definitions of the human. His writings are thus well calculated, in these times, to stir something, felt to be important, in us; at the same ...”