In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged", a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

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