Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

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.

Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.

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

We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.