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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'In their needling, selfish, dry-as-dust way, these three books are works of cumulative power and never less than consistent interest.'
@lieutenantkije weighs up the final novel in J M Coetzee's Jesus trilogy.
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'It remains a poem comprised of clay fragments, short and long, and though the desert delivers up occasional additional text, we are a long way from a whole poem.'
Michael Schmidt on the oldest surviving poem in the world.
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