|
The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living...
Reporting ill of another is one of the most difficult and delicate of rhetorical operations; to be persuasive, to leave the reader with an impression of X's badness and of one's own disinterestedness and goodness, requires great skill. One cannot just blurt out how awful X is. All this achieves is to arouse the reader's sympathy for X.
-- Janet Malcolm
|
