Editors

"The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom."

"Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny."

"But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism,” than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.” As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests."

"It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism."

"Stop being astounded by the realization that sex is the object of such misunderstanding and of such automatic clumsiness that it implies either a universal loathing or a universal veneration (which are much the same thing)."

"Nombres est écrit avant mai 1968, coïncidence improbable mais profonde."

"The world belongs to women. In other words, to death. But everyone lies about it."

"On ne peut réfléchir sur les precepts de la morale sans être étonné de les voir tout à la fois estimés et négligés; et l'on se demande la raison de cette bizarrerie du cœur humain, qui lui fait goûter des idées de bien et de perfection dont il s'éloigne dans la pratique."

"Rien n'est plus capable d'inspirer du courage à une femme que l'intrépidité d'un homme qu'elle aime."

"Un cœur de père est le chef-d'œuvre de la nature."

"Il faut compter ses richesses par les moyens qu'on a de satisfaire ses désirs."

"Combien trouve-t-on de déserteurs de la sévère vertu et combien en trouvez-vous peu de l'amour?"

"Crois-tu qu'on puisse être bien tendre lorsqu'on manque de pain?"

"Rien n'est plus admirable et ne fait plus d'honneur à la vertu, que la confiance avec laquelle on s'adresse aux personnes dont on connaît parfaitement la probité."

"C'est un fonds excellent de revenu pour les petits, que la sottise des riches et des grands."

"Il n'y a que l'expérience ou l'exemple qui puisse déterminer raisonnablement le penchant du cœur. Or l'expérience n'est point un avantage qu'il soit libre à tout le monde de se donner; elle dépend des situations différentes où l'on se trouve placé par la fortune. Il ne reste donc que l'exemple qui puisse servir de règle à quantité de personnes dans l'exercice de la vertu."

"J'ai à peindre…un caractère ambigu, un mélange de vertus et de vices, un contraste perpétuel de bons sentiments et d'actions mauvaises."

"The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact – that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary)."

"If ever a man came out fighting, Leavis did: this, to many of us is one of his major virtues, because of the importance of the things he was fighting for. With others, he was working to make English grow to its place as a central subject in a contemporary humane education, with the emphasis on criticism and on cultural history rather than on academicism and the vagaries of 'taste'. He was as uncompromising as he was urgent and as angry as he was determined."

"He is a critic of great gifts, insight and integrity; but those who are not entirely for him are wholly against him; he seeks not pupils but "disciples"; those disciples he has attracted who have not broken away have been, like the master, rancid and fanatic in manner."

"A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of meningitis. His career was the clearest possible proof that the course the arts take is not under the control of criticism."

"The very prevalence of what one might call the ‘outsider than thou’ attitude among intellectuals indicates that there is a form of competition for a perceived cultural good at work here. Whether it is the Cambridge don and influential critic F R. Leavis describing himself as an ‘outlaw’, or the old Etonian and widely published author and journalist George Orwell casting himself as a ‘literary pariah’, or the well-connected, well-heeled, well-reviewed novelist Virginia Woolf aspiring to found a ‘Society of Outsiders’ (or, more recently, the tenured professors-cum-media stars trying to lay claim to the prestige of the ‘exile’), the very repetitiveness of the claims tells us that what we are dealing with here is a symptom of the logic of being an intellectual, not an objective description of a social or cultural location. As a self-ascribed status, outsiderdom is an empowering identity, an attempt to use the available media to address the relevant publics without, so the claim goes, succumbing to the seductions and self-deceptions of insiderdom."

"The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy."

"He doesn't know what he means, and doesn't know he doesn't know."

"Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."

"It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life."

"A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying."

"The fattest hog in Epicurus' sty."

"There is hardly a writer of his period who is so little known in our day and whose poems ran through so many editions in his own day. The reviews praised his works; Gray spoke highly of them; Walpole was all adulation; Mrs. Siddons acted in one of his plays; Reynolds annotated one of his poems; Johnson admitted the power of his satire; and Warton went out of his way to bestow supreme commendation upon his didactic poetry. Works by Mason were done into German, French, and Italian; and more than a score of early biographies testify to the interest in his life and personality."

"When'er with soft serenity she smiled, Or caught the orient blush of quick surprise, How sweetly mutable, how brightly wild, The liquid lustre darted from her eyes?"

"Wer keine Blume mehr liebt, dem ist alle Liebe und Gottesfurcht verloren."

"The city, that monster with a hundred mouths and a thousand ears, a monster that knows nothing but says everything, had written me off."

"Das wahrhaft Schöne, Große und Erhabene, so wie es uns in Erstaunen und Verwunderung setzt, überrascht uns doch nicht als etwas Fremdes, Unerhörtes und Niegesehenes, sondern unser eigenstes Wesen wird uns in solchen Augenblicken klar, unsre tiefsten Erinnerungen werden erweckt, und unsre nächsten Empfindungen lebendig gemacht."

"Die Liebe wintert nicht; Nein! nein! Ist und bleibt Fruhlingesschein."

"Out of that bungled, unwise war An alp of unforgiveness grew."

"His poetry may be divided into comic extravaganza on the one hand, and more personal work on the other. There is no one like him in the world in the former genre; as a "light poet" he is preferable to John Betjeman – as fluent in traditional forms, his work is never vitiated by refuge in the poetical or high sentimental, and his choice of words is subtler, funnier and altogether sharper. In his other vein Plomer is fastidious, reticent, elegant and the author of some memorable and moving lines."

"His most celebrated poems are, of course, the historical-satirical ballads (A or even X certificate) in which a person or period is "hit off", in the sense both of being preserved and hit for six."

"Brzeska and Brooke were among those she knew And she lived long enough to meet Lawrences, too, D. H. and T. E. – she who'd known R. L. S., Talked to Hardy of Kim, and to Kipling of Tess!"

"So never say to D'Arcy, 'Be your age!' — He'd shrivel up at once or turn to stone."

"'Look who's here! Do come and help us fiddle while Rome burns!'"

"A rose-red sissy half as old as time."

"When her guests were awash with champagne and with gin She was recklessly sober, as sharp as a pin: An abstemious man would reel at her look As she rolled a bright eye and praised his last book."

"A pleasant old duffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."

"With first-rate sherry flowing into second-rate whores, And third-rate conversation without one single pause: Just like a young couple Between the wars."

"Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designed Than other times when blind men into ditches led the blind, When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind, And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind."

"A family portrait not too stale to record Of a pleasant old buffer, nephew to a lord, Who believed that the bank was mightier than the sword, And that an umbrella might pacify barbarians abroad: Just like an old liberal Between the wars."

"On a sofa upholstered in panther skin Mona did researches in ."

"It's so utterly out of the world! So fearfully wide of the mark! A Robinson Crusoe existence will pall On that unexplored side of the Park — Not a soul will be likely to call!"

"The commonplace needs no defence, Dullness is in the critic’s eyes, Without a licence life evolves From some dim phase its own surprise;Under these yellow-twinkling elms, Behind these hedges trimly shorn, As in a stable once, so here It may be born, it may be born."

"Who strolls so late, for mugs a bait, In the mists of Maida Vale, Sauntering past a stucco gate Fallen, but hardly frail?"