his own prose, built of solid blocks of exegesis and description

He seems to rear panoptically above his subjects

a rather synoptic voraciousness

he rather strangely praised Henry James for 'his classical equanimity [...]'

this would enable him to trace a line from the aestheticism of Mallarmé and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam to Proust

I am guilty of its every stricture and I take an extraordinary delight in its considered approbation

Wilson could see that it was psychologically credulous of Marx to believe that when the proletariat took over it would simply be on its best behaviour. What was the evidence for this? Why would the worker not want what the capitalist plutocrat had? [...]

[...]

But Rousseau's speculative theology of the fall of man only forces the very question that Wilson cannot face in Marx. If man was once good, in his state of nature, and is now bad, i his state of society, how exactly did he begin to corrupt. Did he become bad because human nature is corrupt, or because society corrupted his goodness? If the latter, what is the hope for a utopian restoration of man? How do we get back--or back and forward at once--to the ideal state of man? Likewise, did the revolution of 1917 go bad because corrupt huma nature cannot be trusted with revolutionary despotism, or because violent revolution is at its heart a corrupt idea? And if the answer to either question is yes, the question fudged by Rousseau returns: how do we reach utopia ; how do we--in Rousseau's terms--restore what has been lost?

leave them in a dapple of ambiguity rather than drag them out into any prematurely decisive light of judgment

his passionate and expiatory nature

this pugilistic confidence is surely misplaced

unlike the poorer stories, which are lovingly excoriated

Lionel Trilling imbricates ideas and aesthetics with greater skill