"Rather than high academic ponderousness, it employs deft synopses and punchy polemics. Eagleton is a master of the one-liner, sometimes to encapsulate a difficult theory ("deconstruction is the death drive on the level of theory") and often to issue a devastating put-down ("Stanley Fish is the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect"). In "The Politics of Style," an essay on Fredric Jameson, the leading Marxist critic in the United States, Eagleton observes that Jameson appropriates a wide range of philosophical thoughts, recombining them in a dense dialectical process. Eagleton likewise has a talent for covering a remarkable range, but he digests ideas in a centrifugal process, spinning out the husks from the kernels. Consequently reading Jameson can be like reading Hegel or Adorno, while reading Eagleton is more like reading Anthony Lane, the virtuoso film reviewer for The New Yorker; you read their reviews to come upon cheeky lines as well as crisp summaries, and there have not been many jokes in the corpus of contemporary theory."