“I know readers who have thrown this book across a room…”

Dwight Garner on Paul Fussell’s Class (1983)

A prickly observer of language, he notes that “an important class divide falls between those who feel veneration before the term executive and those who feel they want to throw up.” (…)

If you are not secure in your fondness for professional sports, back away from Fussell now. “The World Series and the Super Bowl give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore, to play for the moment the impressive barroom pedant, to imitate for a brief season the superior classes identified by their practice of weighty utterance and informed opinion.”