The new pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them … - George Steiner

Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien — the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive — tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.

The age of the book is almost gone.

What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?