I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

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.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.