For those who can competently read it's a regrettable feature of life that the interpolation of the word academic between good and prose generally negates the two. "Good academic prose" at best describes a sort of Masonic handshake, which in a mostly unobtrusive manner announces belonging to an elect society. At worst it's simply a misnomer, a perverse revel in the English language's capacity for abuse. Fortunately, there are academics who write good prose, conventions be damned. But it's usually a mixed bag, even with the good ones.
James Simpson is a professor of English at Harvard and has devoted his life to studying some of the language's greatest and foundational stylists. I hope it still hurts him to cramp his own writing to the dreary lecturing mode of contemporary academic custom; it certainly hurts reading his insightful—I'm recommending it—Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.
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