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)

Date: February 16, 2019

"He says he became practiced at leading victims gently back to their traumas, so they could use their minds as cameras to bring key moments to life, letting their faces and voices tell the stories."

— Dowd, Maureen (b. January 14, 1952)