Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere"Hitchens provides rich evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist are nourished by an erudite familiarity with a broad sweep of novelists, essayists and poets. In these pages Oscar Wilde's profound radicalism is uncovered; George Orwell's role as a fulcrum between left and right is carefully appraised; the languid irony and cosmopolitanism of Gore Vidal are celebrated; and a discussion of the fatwah issued against Salman Rushdie prompts a meditation on the West's misunderstood encounter with Islam. Along the way, a refined and knowledgeable palate samples offerings from, amongst others, P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Saul Bellow, Alan Bloom, Philip Larkin and Patrick O'Brian, and dethrones the overrated, conspicuous among them such figures as Tom Wolfe and Isaiah Berlin."--BOOK JACKET. |
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Page 131
... Mencken was the impresario to Clarence Darrow and became , for all succeeding generations , the official historian and quote - meister of the episode . Yet he was a bigot . Indeed , not so much a bigot as an actual ' scientific ' or ...
... Mencken was the impresario to Clarence Darrow and became , for all succeeding generations , the official historian and quote - meister of the episode . Yet he was a bigot . Indeed , not so much a bigot as an actual ' scientific ' or ...
Page 135
... Mencken to have made . Nor was this a singular instance conditioned by friendship , Mencken also became an adoptive editorial parent to James T. Farrell , whose Studs Lonigan trilogy pos- sessed the same proletarian integrity and whose ...
... Mencken to have made . Nor was this a singular instance conditioned by friendship , Mencken also became an adoptive editorial parent to James T. Farrell , whose Studs Lonigan trilogy pos- sessed the same proletarian integrity and whose ...
Page 136
... Mencken's politico - philosophical ambivalences do not cancel one another out . What I have said about his brilliance and verve can only be said of the period between about 1910 and the end of Prohibition the when he could be contra ...
... Mencken's politico - philosophical ambivalences do not cancel one another out . What I have said about his brilliance and verve can only be said of the period between about 1910 and the end of Prohibition the when he could be contra ...
Contents
Oscar Wildes Socialism | 9 |
George Orwell and Raymond Williams | 26 |
Oh Lionel | 44 |
Copyright | |
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Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere Christopher Hitchens No preview available - 2014 |
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