Christopher, like many other writers, was shockingly ignorant of the objective world, except where it touched his own experience. When he had to hide his ignorance beneath a veneer, he simply consulted someone who could supply him with the information he needed.

The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, per…

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, 'How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?' He answered, 'All of them.' I wasn't surprised. But, just the …

Gore Vidal, who wrote Williwaw at only nineteen, was another whose early book could well have been his last, but instead he wrote a series of books that varied…

So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.