Vitriol

Durrell, Lawrence: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"

Nabokov, Vladimir, on Henry James: "He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot. . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist. . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all."

Nabokov, Vladimir, on Freud: "I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons. "

Woolf, Virginia, on Henry James: "Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James. . . We have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"

Here is Phillip Hensher's hilarious destruction of The Book of Kings by James Thackara.