Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.