Cracked me up:
When Trevor-Roper attacked R. H. Tawney's theory of the progressive bourgeois giving rise to the Puritan revolution in England, one of the editors of the journal to which he sent his attack wrote to his coeditor: “I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it is impossible to be polite or a fundamentally unpleasant person . . . using rudeness as a disguise for nastiness.”
Joseph Epstein
