Terry Eagleton v Martin Amis.

[yuxonomei]

I think my favourite example of Academics going on the offensive was when Professor Terry Eagleton revised the preface for Ideology: An Introduction and stuck the knife firmly into Kingsley Amis's corpse and into Martin Amis's chest.

'A racist, anti-semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals. Amis fils has

Comments

[ideealisme]

"I have never even heard of this man Eagleton. But he seems to be a rather lethal combination of having been a Roman Catholic and become a Marxist ... He strikes me as like a spitting cobra - if you get within his range he'll unleash some poison." - Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Mi - a - ow! Bit of an establishment snob, isn't she?

Mind you I find this sort of regularly trotted-out-white guilt on Eagleton's part monumentally tedious:

"champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment."

Yeah we're all colonialists - we SHOULD get blown up.

[ashkitty]

Wow. That is definitely an attack! *cowers under a chair*

[arcana_mundi]

Fantastic example! Even my mother heard about this one, and she's not an academic per se (just bookish). Crazy fierce.