The purest pretension. A certain artifice. A failure or refusal to cohere. Chewy words. Insistent and mysterious italics. Eccentric punctuation. Deliberately awkward punctuation. Obvious awkwardnesses. Deliberate infelicities. Peculiar phrases. Slightly confusing phrases. Sudden obscurity. That is a list, more or less verbatim, of some of the unlikely – or not so unlikely – qualities and features that the Irish-born critic and essayist Brian Dillon prizes in writing, or as he often prefers to say, ‘loves’ in or ‘wants from’ it. Dillon also likes lists themselves, and is always making lists of things he likes. A meticulous, vigilant, in many ways immaculate stylist, he copies out stylish passages, sentences and phrases he comes across in his reading, and keeps a list of ‘words to be looked up, words to be used, words merely to be admired’.
