the best lines from this research article I had to read:

• “or in the late-summer bloom of academic narcissism, a postmodern literary critic.”
  
• “all one can do is weep”
  
• “the same mixture of horror and pride that a father might feel upon learning that his 14 year old son has got a classmate with child”
  
• “Huh?”
  
• “of course Latin historians frequently failed to tell the truth”
  
• “squalls of nonsense from France”
  
• “we can scream in mirth at the feebleness of the criteria”
  
• “the study of Latin prose authors was traditionally regarded as the province of dullards”
  
• “ ‘it wants figs!’ ” 
  
• “a little innocent rhetorical gussying”
  
• “the result is like the diary of a teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none”
  
• “the ecstasy of parsing!”
  
• “to John Henderson the Annals were - well, as usual with John Henderson, who can tell?”
  
• “this sad stuff”
  
• “the Annales Maximi, about which controversy will never cease”
• “as perverse as it would be to read the New York Times as if it were a novel by John Grisham”
  
• even the title itself, “historians without history: against roman historiography” (keep in mind that this article is found in a compilation called “the roman historians”, as if the overall salt content of the writing was not already high enough)