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What tosh Terry Eagleton writes. Amazed that his dizzying chorus - Burke, Brecht, Hegel, Beckett, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kant, Marx, Balzac, Trollope, Dickens, Nietzsche, Hume, Pascal and so on - all sing from the same hymn sheet? Just pay no attention to what any of them meant, let alone the historical circumstances in which they wrote, or that they might have disagreed with one another. Look, instead, for a few key words - "freedom", "terror", "power", "anarchy", "tragedy" - string together a series of allusions, slipping and sliding from one revered author to the next, gloss over the odd hiatus by dialectically transforming some notion into its opposite, and hey presto: terror is bourgeois. Now we know why suicide bombers blow up Tube trains!

Roger Harris

Newbury