Articles

This article search facility looks useful. I discovered interviews with Berger and Zizek, some Derrida and Edward Said obituaries and, a random example, Eagleton on Dickens:

Social life, as usual with Dickens, is just a bewildering assortment of eccentrics, grotesques, amiable idiots and moral monstrosities. They have no language in common, as each sports his or her unique mode of speech like an eye-catching disability. The only thing they share, ironically, is solitude. Jo is an orphan, like so many Dickensian children; but being orphaned is now a collective condition, as society disowns responsibility for its citizens.

What governs this world, as in Little Dorrit or Great Expectations, is money. But money is no longer just in the miserliness of a Fagin: it is now a system that imprisons and denatures even those supposed to be in command of it. The staggeringly rich financier in Little Dorrit, Merdle (another suggestively excremental name), is a mouse of a man terrified of his own butler and driven finally to suicide. The government officials who supposedly run the state bureaucracy advise you confidentially to steer well clear of it. Crime, poverty and deepening inequality are now apparently "Nobody's Fault" -- one of Dickens's original titles for Bleak House.