From a New York Times book review by Dwight Garner headlined “A Lightning Rod Defends His Legacy (and Has a Few Regrets)”:

“When you talk about politics,” the critic Irving Howe said, “you should stand.” Martin Peretz quotes this line early in “The Controversialist,” his new memoir, as a style of moralizing he was never crazy about. But the observation suits him. Peretz writes as if he were pacing around a dining-room table, ego and self-loathing fighting it out in his head.