We have all seen studies, indexes, and tables purporting to assess the level of democratic development throughout the world, and these cannot but remind us of nineteenth-century quackery – something along the lines of Drs. John Kellogg and Havelock Ellis – with its measurements of life force.  The truth is we know a man’s alive, and roughly how alive he is, just by looking at him as he reads the morning paper.

I love talking about books I haven’t read.  In part because it’s a national tradition, ever since everybody in Russia came up with something nasty to say about Doctor Zhivago without having laid eyes on the novel. But partly, and on a more serious note, because it’s very much in the general tradition of literary dramaturgy, when utterly fictional writers, painters, or composers tread the boards with splendid aplomb even as the reader is left wondering about what their novels, paintings, or sonatas might actually be like.