Benjamin Moser: “In [Susan Sontag’s] essayistic writing, strength expressed through categorical statements often became a besetting weakness. … In her often unloved fiction, however, she turned insecurity into a virtue.”
Charles McGrath: “What we tend to forget about Kipling, in our haste to pigeonhole him as a Victorian crank and reactionary, is that for all his failings he was also prodigiously gifted.”