If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the ‘human’ that present bourgeois society can muster.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.
I attacked Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.
Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason.
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.