The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

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

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.