A C Grayling
Philosophy for the People
Good reviews, of course, please writers greatly, but not as greatly as bad reviews upset them. Writers are an irritable tribe, and remember a bad review with tenacity and bitterness long after the good ones are forgotten. Since it is a rare book that does not encounter at least one reviewer with a hangover, or who has just had a domestic quarrel, or who has been selected by the review editor for a known antipathy to the author, it is a rare scribbler who does not carry somewhere the quietly or otherwise suppurating wound inflicted by barbs of criticism.
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It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings