Sublime

“Everything Max does is directed toward the whole effect of the book.... He believes in your characters; they become completely real to him.... He can take a mess of chaos, give you the scaffold, and then you build a house on it....

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.

It’s just this definition of “author” that Barthes in ’68 was trying to refute, arguing with respect to the first criterion that a writer cannot determine his text’s consequences enough to be really responsible (Salinger wasn’t hauled into court as an accessory when John Lennon was shot), and with respect to the second that the writer’s not the tex

And he found the most effective way to appeal to them: he built a simple, clear master narrative that his audience could remember and repeat.

But what if you were to muster your own authority? I don’t mean making up facts and quotations. I mean, what if the reader trusted your prose, Listened with interest to what you’re saying For the sake of what you’re saying, Instead of noting the complacency, the deference, even the ceremony With which you bow to the authorities you cite? What if th

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

‘David stares into the fire wondering whether to vote Labour or Conservative’, as the audience have no way of inferring that.