The sad truth is that little has been written in French that even the French will read for a generation. They are a nation with a thin literary heritage and virtually no literary present. Their contribution to the world's library in the past 30 years has been cartoon books which they consider art and literary criticism which is unreasonable. We have the French to thank for deconstruction. They are good at criticism. They have pathetically declined from being a second-rate nation to being the shrill, pinched, finger-pointing nag of Europe.
--A.A. Gill (1954- ) in a newspaper article ca 1995
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