Terry Eagleton is an exceptionally prolific writer, and unlike some others of whom that may be said, he is fluent, witty and genial, though toward political opponents -- bourgeois liberal humanists on one hand, and on the other spineless postmodernists -- he can be quite waspish. For he is a political animal, situated on the extreme left, but having little or nothing in common with the people he nowadays finds there.--For reasons he gives in this book he holds in contempt thinkers who refuse to think about religion. He began life an Irish Catholic and the traces remain; so does an Irish versatility, for he has written plays and memoirs as well as books both large and small, both popular and learned. He is an academic who has done what few academics would dream of doing -- abandoned Oxford for a more congenial post at a provincial English university.--Altogether he is a remarkable man, and he has been enormously influential. —— Frank Kermode; Good News From Bad; The New York Times; Dec 29, 2002

After 20 years chronicling Charles's abuses of his position, to tabloid outrage and Palace smears, I have been struck since the Burrell revelations by the number of loyalists who tell me they have now lost faith in their prince. They stuck with him even through the low points of the Diana-Camilla saga, but have been finally disillusioned by the absurdly Ruritanian style in which he is now seen to live, making his waspish interventions in British life from a super-pampered world that bears no relation to its citizens' reality. —— Anthony Holden; Bad Heir Day; Guardian; March 9, 2003

Throughout ''America's Queen,'' various members of the East Coast Protestant establishment share waspish observations and recollections about the elegant Roman Catholic who hovered over the center of their hive. —— William Norwich; Her Majesty; The New York Times; Dec 17, 2000

To be fair, Mr. Marrs never conceals his agenda. Moreover, his choice of evidence seems selective, to say the least. Inconvenient facts tend to be treated cursorily, if at all. His language is just as revealing. The waspishly pedantic Philip Klass, whose skeptical writings are the best in the field, is little more than a ``debunker.'' By contrast Linda Moulton Howe, the best-known proponent of the theory that aliens are experimenting on Western cattle, is an ``expert.'' —— Andrew Stuttaford; Books, Arts & Manners; National Review; July 1997