If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

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

Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.

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.