Essays in Biography Quotes

“In an otherwise perfectly mediocre presidency, the one savvy thing John F. Kennedy did, at least for his own reputation, was to bring these Cambridge intellectuals on board.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“A man who always carried a well-lubricated status detector, he settled in at Harvard.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“Trevor-Roper never granted Waugh intellectual respect, but did acknowledge that in face-to-face confrontations he could not win, owing to Waugh’s superior rudeness.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“We are reminded of the court-parasites of the Roman Empire, of whom Juvenal wrote: the bad jokes of Fortune—village pierrots yesterday, arbiters of life and death today,”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“In one of the papers he wrote for the All Souls fellowship, he referred to Rousseau’s Confessions as “a lucid journal of a life so utterly degraded that it has been a bestseller in France ever since.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“During the Vietnam War, Sontag went off to Hanoi as one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots”—that is, people who could be expected to defend Communism without any interest in investigating the brutality behind it.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“The problem is that Sontag wasn’t sufficiently interested in real-life details, the lifeblood of fiction, but only in ideas. She also wrote and directed films, which were not well reviewed: I have not seen these myself, but there is time enough to do so, for I have long assumed that they are playing as a permanent double feature in the only movie theater in hell.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

“His waiting for Teddy left Schlesinger rather in the position of the poor village idiot paid by his shtetl to sit at the outskirts of town awaiting the arrival of the messiah.”
― Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography