Seven hundred pages is, at best, a dear friend and at worst, a co-worker, the kind who sends you political forwards.

I want not to resort to the repellent vernacular of the internet meme, but my reaction to the book is difficult to express otherwise, so, Wow. Just....wow.

"White man oppresses black man, is oppressed in turn by jungle mysteries."

The people in Brideshead Revisited are also Catholic with their affections, but for them it means something different, namely that they are crazy.

I don't tend to condemn books solely because the writer was some variety of wretch. But I have done so if I think it will create a smoke-screen for the fact that I did not understand the book.

Carson McCullers attains a level of virtuosity on many fronts, but I was most taken with her depiction of relationships, many of which balance on a knife edge of propriety, wavering back and forth between the lovely and the weird and the outright perverse.

Sometimes I was (very marginally) enjoying it and sometimes I was thinking that if I must read about scary, disgusting things I'd rather get my copy of The Stand out from under the bed and at least have a good time.

It’s like having a harem wherein all the inmates are related to one another and look alike, yet retain sterling qualities of their own.

Kipling, I have observed, is catnip to gentlemen over a certain age; how far they are over that age determines how much they own up to his allure.