Terry Eagleton

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur ''Thou still unravished bride of quietness,'' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the lit

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

It is silly to call fat people ''gravitationally challenged'' - a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.