Henry Steele Commager on Gone With The Wind

On Scarlett: She had no mind, but she had a mind of her own; she had no subtlety but she had a genius for getting below the surface of things and knowing their reality; she was full of pretense and wile, but she was impatient of all sham, convention and shibboleth...She was not a lady, though she wanted to be, but a magnificent woman, a vital, proud, passionate creature...sentimental but without nonsense, deeply rooted in the soil of Tara, but uprooted too, and lost. 

Ian Penman on Mods

Rockers had shivs, skinheads had bovver boots, hippies might dose you - what was a Mod going to do? Make you listen to Otis Redding? Force you to buy a decent pair of trousers?

Seamus Perry on Ted Hughes

All of which implies cultural history painted with the broadest of brushes: the villain of the piece is the Renaissance, that catastrophe of individualism, which gave birth at once to the hubris of the scientific mind and the desiccated spiritualism of reformed Christianity, both of which involve getting our relationship with nature wrong.  "The story of the mind exiled by nature is the story of Western Man," wrote Hughes..."Our civilisation is an evolutionary error."