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

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

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

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

The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.

Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.