The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

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

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

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

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

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

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.