Search Results

“... Johnsonians have been telling us for decades that Boswell makes an unreliable guide to the mind of his mentor. They say that one tastes Johnson’s profundity not in his conversation but in his writing, and above all in the essays on morality. In those works, says W.J. Bate, ‘we have the essence of Johnson.’ A careful reader of the life by Boswell must agree that the biographer’s genius was not intellectual: the eagle did not always carry the lark with him when he soared ...”

“... The life of Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis is a great act of consonance. But one reviewer has deprecated the fact that Ehrenpreis does not write with Swift’s genius. So the first thing to say is that Ehrenpreis, though he has the great good sense never to emulate the supreme Swiftian manner, does nevertheless command the steely style which T ...”

“... operating beneath a deceptive surface. The two passages I have cited are not discussed in Ehrenpreis’s book, but they are germane to it. In an earlier book of essays, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values, Ehrenpreis was concerned to correct certain excesses of recent criticism by reminding us that Augustan ...”

“... difficult questions, or to speculate about their answers. That is what the late Professor Irvin Ehrenpreis, American author of the standard three-volume biography of Swift, chose to do.’ Ehrenpreis declared that he wished to ‘eliminate fables’ and ‘legendary Swiftiana’. In quest of Swift’s ...”

“... Murry’s book is still vivid, but it’s a quirky performance, enamoured of a few lurid ideas. Irvin Ehrenpreis’s biography is assumed to be definitive, and I agree that the ascertainable facts are rigorously displayed. But it is an unexciting work. Ehrenpreis’s plan was to eliminate the fables and legends which ...”

“... of all this, that Swift’s 20th-century biographers approached their task with so few misgivings. Irvin Ehrenpreis’s brisk monograph The Personality of Jonathan Swift (1958) was followed by an exhaustive three-volume biography, Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age (1962-83), which eventually ran to two thousand pages. An anonymous reviewer of Volume ...”