What makes for brilliant writing, in English at least?

A subtle combination of perhaps three big things.

Clarity, Energy and Wisdom.

Clarity of message, combined with clarity in delivering it.

Energy in both thought and language.

Wisdom in cutting through the infinite hubbub of facts and arguments out there and looking bluntly at things that matter, both now and over time.

Here are two impressive recent examples.

First, P J O’Rourke demolishing US conservatives for letting down themselves and the country.

Try these passages which jump off the page/screen and sock you on the nose:

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast’s swollen gut, and didn’t pull the trigger…

… The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances …The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani…

… Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters… we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven’t done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is.

The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to–as it were–foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law…

We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It’s one more job we botched…

Devastating. Simple. And profound.

For a very different subject and (it must be said) a denser if not even rather exhausting style, see Camilla Paglia on how she chose the works to include in her superb poetry anthology Break, Blow, Burn:

A homoerotic love poem by Auden that I had always planned to include begins, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.” But when I returned to it, I found the poem perilously top-heavy with that single fine sentence. Everything afterward dissolves into vague blather. It was perhaps the most painful example that I encountered of great openings not being sustained…

I found Bishop’s much-anthologized poem “The Fish” nearly unbearable due to her obtrusively simmering self-pity. (Wounded animal poems, typifying the anthropomorphic fallacy, have become an exasperating cliché over the past sixty years.) … It may be time to jettison depressiveness as a fashionable badge of creativity…

Emanuel’s intense imagery, skillfully underplayed, is tremendously evocative. The knife and white-bellied trout suggest sex but also a masochistic vulnerability. Exquisitely caught details abound in quick scenarios … This poem patiently, methodically offers its story without sentimentality or melodrama. There is no flinching from harsh facts and yet no gratuitous self-dramatization either…

A. R. Ammons’ “Mechanism” upset me severely and still does. This poem should have been the dramatic climax of Break, Blow, Burn. In fact, it should have been one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. Its vision of complex systems operating simultaneously in human beings and animal nature is at the very highest level of artistic inspiration. But in execution, the poem is a shambles, with weak transitions and phrasings that veer from the derivative to the pedantic…

Two great writers and thinkers.

And we get to read them for free.