Activity

the sententious authority of his flamboyantly individualistic style

the communication [...] is in an important sense 'phatic'; a deployment of the appropriate forms and conventions of discourse which has as its goal nothing more than the delightful exercise of taste and reason

folded into a language at once mannerly and pellucid

light, eirenic, and urbane at the very point of satiric ridicule

The very business of criticism, with its minatory overtones of conflict and dissension