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“... is something one has to have a special reason to be interested in. So to write a book, as Leon Wieseltier has done, about the mourning of his father is asking a lot (and to write a book of 585 pages is asking even more). One of the ironies of the so-called mourning process is that it tends to make people even more self-absorbed than they usually ...”

“... The reason for a cockroach in a story must differ from the reason for a cockroach in a kitchen. Leon Wieseltier, TLS It was not home. It was in Tokyo At half-past ten at night or thereabouts. I went into the kitchen, flicked the switch, And saw him crouching on the table’s edge. He was enormous, brown, and very still ...”

“... their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with ...”

“... how conflicts will be managed within a liberal framework remain difficult questions, discussed by Leon Wieseltier in ‘Two Concepts of Secularism’ and by Michael Ignatieff in ‘Understanding Fascism’. On the subject of positive and negative liberty, the essays by Ronald Dworkin and Yael Tamir form a complementary pair. Dworkin shows how the ...”

“... Review of Books and I were crudely and unreservedly accused of anti-semitism by a columnist, Mr Leon Wieseltier (I give his name because he gave his initials only), in the American middle-class weekly the New Republic, which is specifically directed towards people who consider themselves especially rational. The accusation was provoked by an article ...”

“... space for digression and nuance: ‘The Sopranos isn’t Shakespeare, but it is Balzac,’ said Leon Wieseltier. Box sets of DVDs ape the look of a book with their pages of discs, and are designed to fit on bookshelves. In London, in New York, when young literary things meet, book chat is gossip. The smart conversations, the ones they’ve trained ...”

“... in which a man claims he plans to kill George W. Bush, though ‘this scummy little book’, as Leon Wieseltier was moved to call it, lacked bite. Too gentle a writer to stage a truly angry rant, Baker is at his best as a straight-ish novelist in lower-temperature books such as A Box of Matches, an otherworldly report on middle age in which, for ...”

“... Obamaites and the Clintonites are to be found elsewhere. In a recent issue of the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, an Obama sceptic, complained that his positions on foreign policy and national security had ‘a certain homeopathic quality’, more calculated to appeal to his ‘legions of the blissful’ than to meet the needs of an ‘era of ...”

“... But Papas and Adams go on and on.’ He much prefers sparring with a big and capable admirer like Leon Wieseltier than passing on news to his family. And yet he was a dab hand at writing recommendations – we find a good many here, for Guggenheims and Nobels – and he wasn’t at all bad at writing notes to his friends to big them up about their latest ...”

“... that talk of a secular state elicits. Yet Judt’s is hardly a maverick voice, even though Leon Wieseltier has implied as much in an irate rejoinder in the New Republic. If Palestinians and Israelis (of all ethno-religious backgrounds) are indeed to share a single state as equals, the post-Zionist vision also needs to clarify the non-ethnic ...”

“... him as a reluctant liberal. Praising The Age of the Crisis of Man in the New York Times, Leon Wieseltier, the former literary editor of the New Republic, came out for old-style liberal universalism: ‘Don’t just stop,’ he exhorted, ‘Think harder. Get it right. (Why are liberals so afraid of their own philosophy?)’ Michael ...”

“... in North America. It had its supporters – among them, Anthony Lewis in the New York Times and Leon Wieseltier in Dissent (Wieseltier has written a rather different review of The Longest War in Harper’s). But, because Timerman rails against fascists of the right as well as those on the left, it had the misfortune ...”

“... been reiterated recently by public intellectuals such as Timothy Garton Ash, Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier. To hold his own against such adversaries, he suggests that he isn’t speaking solely for himself. Instead, he is giving recognition to the ‘millennial and post-millennial generations’ who find little in liberalism worth saving and are ...”

“... unwillingness to compromise … even in the face of self-immolation’. Liberal hawks such as Leon Wieseltier believe much the same thing: The security situation is at bottom the social-cultural situation. It seems increasingly clear to me that the blame for the violence in Iraq, and for its frenzied recoil from what Fouad Ajami hopefully called ...”

“... Garden, ‘Bellow had three sons: Greg, Adam, and Dan. He also had three disciples: James Wood, Leon Wieseltier and Martin Amis.’ Wood, the literary critic and novelist; Wieseltier, the former literary editor of the New Republic; and Amis, who, on the death of his father, Kingsley, declared to Bellow, ‘You’ll ...”