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Title: Dull and hateful
Review: Hatefulness is always interesting to those who peddle in it, but rarely to other people. You'd have to feel a personal stake in the outdated conservative politics Podhoretz emblematizes or be deeply curious about a group of New York intellectuals who believed they were the center of the known universe in the Fifties, but who have hardly left a cultural legacy as important as (say) Bloomsbury or the Paris Lost Generation. Who the hell cares about the Trillings anymore, or about Lillian Hellman? The end result is the voice of a sad, petty little man recounting both his delight in his cruelties to a group of minor intellectuals he betrayed and his sense of loss at having alienated them from him forever.
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