More like a war fought at sea than on land

He had been up at the front and he'd be going back there next week. Or wherever the front by then was - that indeterminate confusion of minefields and dispositions of vehicles in the empty neutral sand. He once described it to me as more like a war fought at sea than on land, a sequence of advances and retreats in which the participants related only to each other and barely at all to the landscape across which they moved. A war in which there was nothing to get in the way  - no towns, no villages, no people - and nothing tangible to  gain or lose.

P. Lively, Moon Tiger (1987), 72-73

That war [WW2] seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice.

Yates's stories and novels return repeatedly to the weakness and hysterical anxiety of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity. His fiction, begun in the early 1950s, and written throughout the next four decades, was closely shadowed by the Second Word War. For Yates. that war seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice. If you fought in it, you never fought bravely enough (Yates was anxious about the bravery of his own conduct in the Seventy-Fifth Division, in Europe); if you missed it, the rest of your life would be perforated with inadequacies.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 201

The novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people

There are large contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical sceptic is also the great sermonising bully, not only telling us what we must think, but clearly writing a form of history … Second the novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people. Thirdly, theologically speaking War and Peace, for all its radical unconventionality, looks more and more like that characteristically vague growl of nineteenth-century doubt, in which God is no longer describable but impossible to abandon.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 152

And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?

'And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?'

'Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope around her neck and he's got hold of two pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all it was an accident. He didn't know the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper... And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was to stop being married. The stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everyone had to die of a virus - all that was just nonsense just made up by a  lot of poor stupid people who din't know any better.'

A. Huxley, Island (1962), 253

Pedantry and non-pedantry are indications only of temperament, not of culinary skill

And while we're about it: pedantry and non-pedantry are indications only of temperament, not of culinary skill. Non-pedants frequently misunderstand pedants and are inclined to adopt an air of superiority. 'Oh, I don't follow recipes,' they will say, as if cooking from a text were like making love with a sex-manual open at your elbow. Or: 'I read recipes, but only to get ideas.' Well, fine, but let me ask you this: would you use a lawyer who said 'Oh, I glance at a few statutes, but only to get ideas'? One of the best cooks I know automatically gets down a recipe book whenever she roasts a chicken.

J. Barnes, The pedant in the kitchen (2003), 14