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

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart.

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.

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!

I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

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.

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.