Date: 1759

"If not with Prejudice, and Passion blind, / In Reason's Glass, you will your Error find. / Search the Recesses of the human Soul, / Mark there, what secret Springs her Acts controul."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1992

"Only this violence could break open a world constrained by the hidden cameras of conscience and vanity."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2007

"If Belinda's mind is like a whirligig of fashion or a camera obscura, where moving images are cast upon a blank surface umediated by a reflective or critical presence, then Pope supplies the ekphrasis suitable for such machinery."

— Lamb, Jonathan (b. 1945)

Date: September 27, 2012

"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."

— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)

Date: August, 22, 2015

"Partial images slide through my mind, a scattering of words spoken. Neurobiologists say that memory isn’t the replay of a video camera, but instead a pastiche of neuronal fragments gathered from here and there, wandering smells, oddly cut visual scraps, translucent experiences laid on top of one...

— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)

Date: September 5, 2018

"Chief among this novel’s pleasures is viewing the nation -- its landscapes, its people, its curdled politics, its increasingly feudal inequalities -- through the vibrant filters of Gary Shteyngart’s Hipstamatic mind."

— Miles, Jonathan

Date: February 11, 2019

"You can't take your eyes off his eyes--blue and unblinking, as he confronts the world like a camera with the shutter left open, permitting the images to burn into his brain."

— Lane, Anthony (b. 1962)