The pond looks great, precisely because it's in the middle of a building site.
The greatest fiction is great precisely because it concerns itself with universal generalities.Joyce was the supreme example of the writer's writer.
Thus Hollywood's idiotic "message" is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction.
We may be inclined to say that a work of art is great precisely because of the way it looks beautiful, sublime, fascinating — and so conclude that Warhol's boxes are not great works of art.
In the House of Commons, Tory MP Bernard Braine thought "the old Elizabethan age great precisely because the spirit of adventure led great men in little ships to sail into the unknown".
Out of all the "political" writers of the 20th century, Sartre, Malraux, Orwell and so on, only one, I'd argue, produced a truly great novel, and that was Camus; and L'Etranger is great precisely because it's not political.
"Our great British universities are great precisely because they are international – and we urgently need the government to recognise this, to honour the enormous benefit international students bring to the UK," he says.
The film encourages you to see his later years as a kind of ultimate freedom, as the fulfilment of his determination to be true to himself, but there was also much delusional bombast, which is all the more tragic for the fact that his earlier projects are great precisely because of their nuance and their attention to the realities he found around him.
He reminds us of Whitman's point that the greatest writers were "only at ease among the unlearned, and that Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare were great precisely because they tapped into the energies of common people".
And it is likely that this time the town faced even higher water traveling at greater speed precisely because of its neighbors' enhanced levee systems, which forced the water into a narrower, more elevated channel.
But the 1945 consensus was dealt a much greater blow precisely when we all rejoiced at the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the other great 20th century tyranny.
