On Bob Woodward's "Bush At War"

The bare recitation of facts in an out-moded style of journalism. It was ended in the 1950s by the experience of dealing with Senator Joe McCarthy, when journalists realised how misleading it would be simply to report waht he said without informing the reader about his past falsehoods.

Ian Johnston on Stendahl's The Red and the Black

Ultimately, then, for me, one of the main messages of the novel, to the extent that it has a message at all, is the inability of the narrator to pass any sort of reasonable judgment on his story. Inasmuch as he is clearly a successful member of that society, an affluent, well-educated Parisian, who finds nothing but a certain anecdotal amusement. In the tale, I come to see where the source of the real problems in that society might be - the detached urbanity of the civilised person who doesn't care enough, a person for whom the sufferings he relates are unconnected to him, except as an opportunity for many casual evaluative judgments delivered from a detached and superior position, not the vantage, as in Homer, of a sympathetic objectivity, but rather of a sheltered, uncaring amusement.

Then, too, there's the paradox of his attitude to society. For Julien is fiercely ambitious socially. He ha already made up his mind that, despicable as he finds society, his goals are to rise up in that very society. And in many respects his final failure to achieve what Jane Eyre achieves is, I would maintain, linked directly to the fact that he sets himself inauthentic goals in the first place.

In all of this there is a constant sense of how pathetic Julien really is. His vision of himself as a conquering hero in the Napoleonic mode translates itself into complex but endlessly hesitant, self-reflecting and unsatisfying love affairs, which he describes to himself in military language, a style which simply reminds us just how unheroic these achievements are by comparison.