Gulliver

Jonathan Swift was a difficult and unaccountable man: a parson without piety; a chaste adulterer; an Irish patriot who longed to be an English bishop, and lamented that he would die in Dublin like a poisoned rat in a hole; a grave man who rarely laughed but wrote outrageous satires; a misanthrope capable of great kindness to individuals; a social climber who habitually sabotaged himself with his mutinous tongue and pen; a fussy man obsessed with order, notorious for his disorderly relations with two women; an establishment man with the bomb-tossing instincts of an anarchist. If every joke is a tiny revolution, as Orwell said, then Swift is one of our most dangerous and unlikely revolutionaries.

- Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross