It is a commonplace that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is … - Paul Johnson

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement, but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, disenchantment–often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured–that is the definition of revolutionary success.

I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance.
There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ...
Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Fleming's poison. ...

The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very, long time. Indeed 1 cannot recall anything like it ... As a rule, in a civilised country like Britain, those who hate the Israelis, or the Jews in general, are careful to mask their views behind a screen of anti-Zionism, thus in theory giving their collective condemnation a political rather than a racial rationale. Dahl is a different case. He is too reckless, or too angry, or too confident in getting away with it, to take such precautions.