It is the technique of the baboon to try to get its way by violence. - A. C. Grayling

Worst of all, symbols sometimes live on in their own right when what they symbolise has long been forgotten.

Confusion is the beginning of wisdom.

This brings into focus a startling fact: that the practice of contemporary reviewing, whether fiction or non-fiction, owes nothing to self-styled “critical theorists”, those succubi of English Literature departments whose jargonings are read (if they are read at all) only by one another, and who have contributed nothing to the wider world since they hijacked the academic study of literature from its original Quiller-Couchian purpose: which was to educate, liberate, and civilise.
The reason is that the professionalisation of the academy has diverted its form of criticism away from engagement with life.