I Say That Virtue Is Really All

With Fiction, You Can Talk About Plot, Character And Narrative, Whereas A Poem Brings Home The Fact That Everything That Happens In A Work Of Literature Happens In Terms Of Language. And This Is Daunting Stuff To Deal With.

Reading Is Not A Straightforward Linear Movement, A Merely Cumulative Affair: Our Initial Speculations Generate A Frame Of Reference Within Which To Interpret What Comes Next, But What Comes Next May Retrospectively Transform Our Original Understanding, Highlighting Some Features Of It And Backgrounding Others.

Readers Are Less And Less Seen As Mere Non-writers, The Subhuman "other" Or Flawed Derivative Of The Author; The Lack Of A Pen Is No Longer A Shameful Mark Of Secondary Status But A Positively Enabling Space, Just As Within Every Writer Can Be Seen To Lurk, As A Repressed But Contaminating Antithesis, A Reader.

The Liberal State Is Neutral Between Capitalism And Its Critics Until The Critics Look Like They Are Winning.

If There Are Indeed Any Iron Laws Of History, One Of Them Is Surely That In Any Major Crisis Of The Capitalist System, A Sector Of The Liberal Middle Class Will Shift To The Left, And Then Shift Smartly Back Again Once The Crisis Has Blown Over.