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

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.

Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.