3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton 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.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton 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.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton 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.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton 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.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
3 December 2020 Terry Eagleton The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
