admire its laconic plainness or low-keyed sobriety

As the philosophers might say, 'literature' and 'weed' are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things.

The term 'fine writing', or belles lettres, is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which is generally highly regarded, while not necessarily committing you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'.

A pub conversation may well transmit information, but what also bulks large in such dialogue is a strong element of what linguists would call the 'phatic', a concern with the act of communication itself

The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements is part of what is meant by 'ideology'. By 'ideology' I mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in.

his rhetorical claim to be 'representative' of humankind, to speak with the voice of the people and utter eternal verities

English was a upstart, amateurish affair as academic subjects went, hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology; since every English gentleman read his own literature in his spare time anyway, what was the point of submitting it to systematic study

it was possible to smear classical philology as a form of ponderous Teutonic nonsense

the touchstone of literature, which was less an academic subject than a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilization itself

Yet, if it excoriated the bland assumptions of a Sir Walter Raleigh on one level, it was also in complicity with them on another