The Anatomy of Influence, By Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom's magisterial pronouncements are liable to raise irritation (he virtually assumes ownership of Shakespeare) but these are outweighed by his hugely stimulating approach to lit crit.

A visit to Elsinore provokes a reverie about Shakespeare's "lost years": the "rugged brutalism of the fortress troubled me with the intuition that he had been there."

Bloom's view that James Joyce's Ulysses "contaminated" culture, such as Time magazine, brings to mind the New Yorker parody of "Time-ese": "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."

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