“One receives the impression from his writings that he made it his plan to read any book whatever that no one else can bear to read.”
A Voice from the Attic (1960)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Robertson Davies282
Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and nov… 1913–1995Related quotes
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist
F 1
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)
Alice James (1848–1892) American diarist
As quoted in Alice James, Her Brothers — Her Journal (1934).
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Context: When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) American writer, literary and social critic, and noted man of letters
The Triple Thinkers (1938) [Oxford University Press, 1948], Preface, p. ix
Philip Pullman book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ3VcbAfd4w <br class="br">The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010)