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