Roy Andrew Miller's hatchet-jobs

I've mentioned before how it's sort of an ambition to work my way through Roy Andrew Miller's A Japanese Reader.  He died quite recently and his obituary quotes some of his reviews of hapless fellow-academics' work:

“The best that can be said of the authors’ treatment of ancient Chinese and Japanese texts is that it is brave and fearless. Armed with little more than a dictionary and a vivid imagination, they do not shrink from offering novel interpretations for texts that have already been studied at least a thousand years, with the consequent accumulation of a tremendous body of exegetical materials and secondary literature, all of which they are prepared to ignore, just as they are willing to overlook the existence of perfectly correct modern translations, that if consulted, would immediately show where they have gone wrong.”

 They (mostly) don't write them like that any more.  For more, go here.