Thomas Leonard-Roy's "Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain"

Thomas Leonard-Roy studied literature at the University of Toronto (BA, MA) and Harvard University (PhD). He is Assistant Professor of English Literature at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

Leonard-Roy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Writerly Hate in Eighteenth-Century Britain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Writerly Hate begins with a full sentence that neatly sums up what follows: “Boswell’s expressions of self-hate were especially potent and direct after encounters with prostitutes, often while drunk.” The browser then finds several examples of those encounters – in an alcove on Westminster Bridge, in Amsterdam, in Edinburgh near the house of David Hume, in a Charing Cross brothel – and those self-hating expressions, the standard form being “I despised myself.” Further examples show how Boswell’s self-hate about such encounters was regularly expressed in the language of the Bible.

It so happens that page 99 comes in the middle of what I consider the odd chapter of the book – odd because it is the only chapter about self-hate in a book that is otherwise about more social forms of hating. The hate I discuss here is tormented, muttered, whereas the styles of hate I showcase in the rest of the book tend to be more lively and good-humoured. This is also the only chapter of the book about the religious contexts of hate. Page 99 might therefore leave the browser with a poor idea of the whole work.

But I wouldn’t say the page has completely failed the test, for a couple reasons. First, Writerly Hate is about the stylistic diversity of hate, a feeling that we now tend to think of in very rigid ways. If a piece of writing is deemed hateful, you would probably assume it was inflammatory, even seeking to incite violence against a group of people. One would probably not assume it was quiet-spoken, laconic, and confessional, as Boswell’s self-hate is. So – am I cheating the test? – the page is representative of the whole book in the way that it closely describes a distinct style of hate that challenges some of our modern assumptions about this feeling. The other reason is that page 99 is generous with quotations (exactly one third of the total words on the page). This is something I’ve tried to do across the book: let eighteenth-century men and women speak for themselves, as much as possible, without drowning out my own voice as scholar and critic.

Visit Thomas Leonard-Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Bond's "Animate"

Michael Bond, the author of the acclaimed Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way, is a writer specializing in human behaviour and a former editor and reporter at New Scientist. He won the 2015 British Psychological Society Prize for The Power of Others. Until recently, he taught writing as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

Bond applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind, with the following results:

If a reader parachuted onto page 99 of Animate they'd find themselves in a discussion of the fantastical animals in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia – the centaurs, satyrs, fauns, marsh-wiggles, unicorns and dragons that have captivated children for generations – beneath an illustration of strange humanesque figures. Since the book is not specifically about children, fictionalised animals or C. S. Lewis, this is not the ideal place to land. It would take a leap of deduction to figure out that Animate is an exploration of human-animal relationships and how they have changed over 40,000 years. Nonetheless, page 99 is part of a chapter that describes an important part of this thesis: the idea that the creative arts is one of the few areas where people have tested human-animal relationships without fear, where mythological beasts are free to roam and the many attributes that we share with animals are examined and celebrated. So we can say that the parachutist lands close but perhaps not close enough. Or we could take a slightly different approach, noting that Ford Madox Ford talked of page 99 revealing "the quality of the whole”, rather than the sense of it. If you landed among the water-spirits and shape-shifting witches of page 99, would you want to read on? I hope so.

Visit Michael Bond's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ahsan I. Butt's "The Lies That Bind Us"

Ahsan I. Butt's is Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Secession and Security.

Butt applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Lies That Bind Us: Nationalism and History Textbooks, and shared the following:

Page 99 is in a chapter that examines different interpretations of territorial disputes in Latin American history textbooks. This page brings one section of the chapter to a close and begins another, each related to narratives regarding Argentina’s external conflicts. First, the concluding section focuses on its claim to the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, formally British territory. Page 99 explains that although the claim to the Malvinas enjoys broad-based national support in Argentina, the disastrous 1982 war and its association with the military dictatorship makes the episode more complicated for progressive and left-wing nationalists. These groups may affirm Argentine sovereignty over the Malvinas while treating the war itself far more critically than right-wing nationalists do. The page then opens the chapter’s discussion of Argentina’s border issues with Chile, outlining the long history of Argentine-Chilean cooperation and rivalry over borders, Patagonia, and regional power.

Page 99 provides a surprisingly good, if necessarily partial, introduction to The Lies That Bind Us. This page foregrounds one of the book’s central concerns: how countries define their territorial boundaries, and how the stories told about those boundaries vary, depending on which type of nationalism – right-wing, civic, left-wing, or progressive – dominates at a given time.

The discussion of the Malvinas illustrates that territorial claims are not simply accepted or rejected wholesale. Nearly all citizens regard the islands as Argentine territory, but they differ in how strongly they emphasize the claim and how they interpret the 1982 war. Right-wing narratives can celebrate the effort to recover national territory, while progressive and left-wing accounts are more likely to highlight the dictatorship’s brutality and incompetence. The territory remains symbolically Argentina’s, but the meaning of the war changes with the narrator.

The page then turns to Argentina’s border disputes with Chile, especially Patagonia and the Beagle Channel. It introduces the trajectory of the relationship between the neighbors, from allies in the wars of independence to rival regional powers, whose competing territorial claims and broader geopolitical competition in the Atlantic and Pacific produced an arms race, before the 1902 Pactos de Mayo eased tensions. Page 99 therefore captures the chapter’s broader interest in how nationalists narrate a country’s external boundaries: which territories are treated as inherently national, which historical grievances are emphasized and which are forgotten, and how rival states and territorial compromises are portrayed.

Still, much is missing. To begin with, page 99 only addresses Argentina’s external but not domestic territoriality, such as the incorporation of Indigenous lands and peoples. Nor does it touch on the chapter’s second half, which examines Chilean narratives regarding conflicts with Peru and Bolivia, Indigenous peoples such as the Mapuche, and Argentina. Moreover, the page would leave the reader completely unaware of the book’s examination of race and immigration in textbooks from California and Texas or big dates and eras in Indian and Pakistani textbooks.

Finally, page 99 does not display the book’s full theoretical framework, which distinguishes among right-wing, civic, left-wing, and progressive nationalisms, and examines how each constructs the nation’s boundaries of membership, space, and time. The test works well in giving the flavor of one important case study, but only partially for its broader comparative and theoretical scope.

Visit Ahsan I. Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Lin's "When News Breaks"

Carol Lin, best known for being the first national anchor to report the first 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, was a long-time anchor and correspondent for CNN and ABC News. During her career, she covered the war in the Middle East, the aftermath of the Kosovo War, the 2002 Winter Olympics and every imaginable natural disaster from hurricanes, tornadoes, historic wildfires, and floods. Lin received an Emmy, a Peabody, the Alfred I. Dupont Award, and the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Awards for Excellence in both Investigative Reporting and her coverage of the Los Angeles Riots. She currently lives in Hawaii.

Lin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War, and reported the following:

It surprised me to discover that if readers open my memoir, When News Breaks, to page 99, they will gain a remarkably clear understanding of what the book is truly about.

Page 99 captures the emotional aftermath of my journalist husband's marital betrayal. In many ways, it answers the central challenge I face as the author: readers may assume When News Breaks is primarily about my journalism career or the fact that I was the first national television journalist to report the first attack on 9/11. Instead, it is a story about my complicated love for an older newsman, and the journalism careers that tested our marriage.

My husband, Will, had left his position as a television news executive to become communications director for an America's Cup syndicate made up entirely of female sailors. Meanwhile, I was a rising Los Angeles anchor and investigative reporter on the verge of receiving an offer from ABC News. Then ABC's chief investigative correspondent discovered that my husband had engaged in a high-profile one-night stand and intended to feature it in a story about the glamorous lifestyles surrounding the world of competitive sailing.

Page 99 begins after the America's Cup competition ended. Will and I return to the weathered beach house we had just purchased—our forever home, or so we assumed. It was a home that had withstood nature's fury since 1948. Its wooden windows, blistered by the salt air, spoke of quiet resilience. When we bought the house, all we saw was its potential. I recount the sellers' hope that their beloved family home would find the right owners. They asked our realtor whether she was certain the sale would go through. She reassured them with a simple observation: "Carol loves the house, and Will loves Carol."

But the scene that follows asks whether love alone can survive profound betrayal, whether we can survive and thrive through our own breaking news. In my writing program, I learned that every book orbits a single, essential question. Page 99 reveals mine: When is the right time, if ever, to let go of the things we love most?

Visit Carol Lin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Violaine Roussel's "Data-Driven Hollywood"

Violaine Roussel is professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 and research fellow at the Paris Center for Sociological and Political Research (CRESPPA). She is the author of Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies, How to Do Politics with Art, and other books.

Roussel applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming, with the following results:

Page 99 of Data-Driven Hollywood is part of the book’s second chapter, which describes how data specialists came to occupy key positions within streaming platforms—first at the three pioneering organizations, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video—and how they thereby gained increasing influence over the content produced or acquired by the streamers. This chapter is therefore devoted to the origins of data specialists’ “positional power” within Hollywood’s central production organizations. Page 99 focuses on how these professionals helped define their own roles and worked to expand the boundaries of their sphere of influence within the streaming platforms, enabling them to establish themselves as indispensable participants in creative decision-making processes. They achieved this through internal alliances, but also by challenging the power of traditional producers, who until then had largely monopolized the authority to decide what should be produced and to predict what would be successful.

Page 99 of Data-Driven Hollywood can therefore serve as an interesting entry point into the story the book tells: that of the emergence of a new professional category—data and algorithm specialists—who have not only managed to establish themselves in Hollywood but, more importantly, to influence what is symbolically most valuable in that world: the greenlighting process for creative projects. While the Page 99 Test is thus partially successful, the perspective presented on this page does not, however, fully capture all the dimensions the book explores to explain the upheaval caused by the rise of data specialists in Hollywood.

Indeed, simply reading page 99 might leave the reader with the impression that the establishment of data specialists on the content side of Hollywood was the result of a well-coordinated strategy by a professional group or a few figures from the tech sector who set out to conquer Hollywood. The book, on the contrary, rejects this idea: it sheds light on a process of transformation that, as major and profound as it is, was not controlled by any individual or group. It shows how a combination of diversly motivated activities ultimately contributed to the emergence of a powerful new occupational group in Hollywood: that of content data specialists.

The book’s following chapter sheds light on a decisive aspect of this rise of data specialists: it occurred in relation to—and largely in opposition to—another group that occupies a central place in Hollywood, namely producers and creators. The book’s third chapter examines in detail the struggles for power and legitimacy that pitted producers against data specialists, as well as the transformation of occupational arrangements that led them to work together in an increasingly less confrontational manner, until producers recognized that they would henceforth have to work with algorithms and those who create them. The book’s last chapter precisely examines the work and tools of data specialists: it shows that the algorithmic models and instruments they use represent a completely new approach to creative projects and audiences, and reveals the implications that come with it.

Learn more about Data-Driven Hollywood at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joy Dixon's "Sexual Heresies"

Joy Dixon is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and the author of Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (2001).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain, and shared the following:

Page 99 of Sexual Heresies is part of a chapter on “Gender, Sex, and the Body in Modern Esotericism,” looking at gender, sex, and sexuality in ritual and sexual magic in the modern occult revival. This section explores sex and gender in the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875) and the associated Order of Universal Co-Freemasonry, an esoteric Masonic Order that admitted men and women on equal terms. The passage makes two key points: that whether and how the sexed body mattered in the ritual work of the Order was in question from the very beginning of Co-Masonic work, and that the rituals worked within the Order tended, paradoxically, both to emphasize and collapse the distinctions between members inhabiting male and female bodies (theosophists’ belief in reincarnation meant that the “true self” used a particular sexed body only for this lifetime).

For Co-Masons, as for the TS as a whole, teaching on sexual difference was complicated, unstable, and often internally contradictory. Over and over again the rites that were worked simultaneously emphasized sexual difference and collapsed or denied those differences; both the movement across the sexual binary and the undoing of that binary were key to the work. Men and women were initially drawn to each other because of their differences—differences derived from the experience of a sexed and gendered body. But through association—inside or outside the Masonic Lodge—they became more alike.

The rest of the page provides examples from The Link, the journal of the Theosophical Society’s secret Esoteric Section, and from The Co-Mason, to illustrate those claims.

If you read page 99 and expected the rest of the book to be about esotericism and sexual magic, you would be wrong – the next chapter deals with the sexual politics of evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholic “social purity” movements. In that sense, the Page 99 Test fails. But in another sense it works really well, because it takes you to the core argument of the book, which is that the emergence of new scientific ideas about sexuality (especially the new emphasis on the closeness of the religious and sexual impulses) set the stage for rethinking not just sexuality but religion too.

Page 99 is the first part of a discussion that moves on to Dion Fortune’s “polarity magic” and the explicitly sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. The willingness of occult practitioners to make sex – both sexual difference and sexual desire – central to their spiritual practice was one of the things that marked these as “alternative” religions (even as they also worked to shore up conventional ideas about sex and gender).

The first chapter of the book sets up what many religious people saw as a problem – that anthropologists, sexologists, and psychoanalysts had apparently proved that sex and religion derived from the same source and were interchangeable. Chapter 2 explores one response: liberal theologians in both the Catholic and Anglican churches worked to rehabilitate religious experience in the light of these new scientific ideas. Chapter 4 looks at the ways that religious conservatives resisted and reworked the same ideas in terms of sin and purity. The final chapter explores how critics of religion used the close relationships between sex and religion to attack religion itself as a kind of perversion.

Over and over you see an emphasis on the idea that spiritual orthodoxy had to be sexually "normal" and that sexual "deviance" was also spiritually “deviant.” Sexual Heresies tells the story of how new ideas about sex transformed ideas about religion, and explores some of what was at stake in that process.

Learn more about Sexual Heresies at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Libby Adler's "Governing the Terrain Called Beauty"

Libby Adler is a Professor of Law and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform (2018) as well as numerous articles on LGBTQ legal issues. She was appointed a commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth in 2026.

Adler applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Governing the Terrain Called Beauty: The Queerness of Political Economy in Cuba and the United States, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of chapter 4 at a break between sections. The section that is concluding argues that the advent of same-sex marriage in Cuba required a reconfiguration of gay identity. The section that is starting offers a partial theory of how that reconfiguration occurred.

The glimpse via page 99 fairly represents an important piece of the book but does not explain the overall argument.

Part I of the book explains the history of gay identity and regulation in Cuba and the US. In Cuba, the role of imperialism and the fall of Cuba’s prime benefactor, the Soviet Union, are crucial to understanding the evolution of sexual identity in political-economic terms. Part II of the book, in which page 99 appears, is about the advent of same-sex marriage and how that legal reform grows out of distinct historical and economic forces in the two countries (Cuba and the US). Part III introduces Cuban legal voices in the form of interviews and uses these voices to theorize the significance of legal consciousness to divergent forms of legal change.

Learn more about Governing the Terrain Called Beauty at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Sullivan's "Stay Tuned"

Patrick Sullivan is an assistant professor of performance and visual studies at Texas A&M University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Stay Tuned: Listening to the Network Era, with the following results:

When you get to page 99, you will find a discussion of the sitcom’s laugh track and how it differs from other empathetic sound, i.e., non-diegetic music. Both music and the laugh track help us judge the emotional register of a scene—a sort of priming or cueing—but the laugh track goes beyond merely prompting us to an intended response. The laugh track grounds an assessment of the show—what the book takes as an aesthetic judgment—into its very soundtrack, so our response to the laugh track is not simply to emotional priming but also to aesthetic assessment, a sort of “do I or do I not find this moment of the sitcom funny.” And as the 99th page’s chapter title, “Laughter’s Labor,” suggests, what is interesting about the laugh track is not whether you agree with the laugh track or that it worked but rather that it raises the work of aesthetic assessment in the first place.

While page 99 would not give the browser the book’s investment in formally reading television sounds nor the production histories surrounding the sounds, it does give them a sense of the intellectual stakes: the commitment to treating aesthetic theory as important to television studies and vice versa. This page works towards understanding how laugh tracks trouble aesthetic judgments, the mental process of experiencing the world through our senses, reflecting on that experience, and assigning a value to it. Other chapters address different aspects of aesthetic experience through different sound—Hanna-Barbera cartoon sound effects and comprehension as well as noises and contemplation. This troubling is not to suggest that these sounds of television aesthetically fail nor that aesthetic theory fails to help us grasp them. Rather, the book uses the tension, which in popular discourse often gets expressed in terms of value, between them to stage a recalibration of aesthetic theory and a reevaluation of the work the sounds of network-era television perform. While the particularities of aesthetic judgment, contemplation, and comprehension are worked out in detail through the chapters, the broader frame of the tension between aesthetic theory, evaluation of television sounds, and formal analysis are covered in the introduction, “The Trouble with Television Sound.” Finally, while I am biased and love every page in its own right, I recommend the browser turn to page 71.

Learn more about Stay Tuned at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Taylor's "An Elite Education"

Emma Taylor is a Lecturer in Education at King's Academy, King's College London where she currently leads on the development of an induction programme for all new teaching staff at King’s. She joined King’s from LSE where she held the position of teaching fellow on LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course for all undergraduate students, LSE100.

Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, An Elite Education: How Privilege Is Produced in a Private School, and shared the following:

On page 99 of my book I introduce the idea that the students I teach and interview for this research are struggling to reconcile the tension between being aware of the advantages their privilege has given them over others, whilst being unable to shake the feeling that they still deserve to attend elite higher education institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge. They feel that their privilege should not negate the hard work they put into the process of preparing for the intense admissions processes of these institutions.

This is not a central theme of the book, yet it introduces the reader to a key finding regarding the ways in which the students in my study confront their own privilege. They don't outright deny it, nor do they deny some of the practices that have enabled their success (such as extensive practice and preparation for university admissions interviews), instead they negotiate a messy boundary between acceptance and denial, particularly when, as I report earlier in the chapter, they leave school and start to spend time with people for whom privilege is not the norm. This negotiation takes on added significance when considered alongside the influential positions that many of these students are likely to occupy in later life.

Indeed, what’s is missing from this single page is the broader UK context where research by the Sutton Trust (a leading social mobility charity) tells us that those who have attended private schools in Britain continue to be disproportionately represented in positions of power and responsibility with, for example, 68% of FTSE chairs having attended private schools despite only 7% of the school age population being privately educated. We can therefore be relatively confident that many of the people in my study will become influential figures in one way or another. And, later in the book, I ask how the students’ realisation and acknowledgement of their own privilege might be leveraged for the greater good, or more specifically, how it could be harnessed to broaden the range of lived experiences represented among those who hold positions of power.

So, the test enables me to flesh out one element of the book’s argument, but not the central theme – which is ultimately to better understand how private schools in Britain support an environment in which certain privileging dispositions are inculcated and leveraged to propel students into elite higher education institutions and professions. Ultimately, I find that the school serves as a training ground in which a form of audacity in the face of authority can be practiced and honed, enabling those students who are multiply advantaged to feel a sense of comfort when they find themselves in potentially intimidating positions in later life. To bring it back to page 99, this audacity is frequently mistaken for merit by the students themselves and, on a wider scale, British society more generally.

Very happy to hear any thoughts or reflections from anyone who does read the book as a result of this blog – please do get in touch!

Visit Emma Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason Baehr's "Inquiry and Agency"

Jason Baehr is the Casassa Chair in Social Values and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He specializes in theoretical and applied virtue epistemology. His other books include Deep in Thought: A Practical Guide to Teaching for Intellectual Virtues (2021), Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (2016), and The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (2011). He is co-founder of the Intellectual Virtues Academy of Long Beach and is presently co-directing the LMU Intellectual Character Initiative, which is sponsored by a grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.

Baehr applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inquiry and Agency: A Theory of Intellectual Virtues and Vices, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In keeping with this, when thinking about the persons we aspire to be, or the qualities we desire in ourselves, our friends, partners, or children, I take it that few of us would not regard as best or most admirable the relevant harmony between action and affection. We desire, not only to think and act well, but also to enjoy thinking and acting well. One way to put the guiding principle here might be that it is good, and good in a way that is relevant to personal worth, to enjoy and delight in that which itself is good, including the good of virtuous activity (cf. Hurka 2001: Ch. 1; Sripada 2016: 1210). This applies, not just to morally virtuous activity, but also to intellectually virtuous activity.

Often it is a matter of luck (e.g., of how we’ve been parented or our natural temperaments) whether we are constituted so as to enjoy intellectually virtuous activity or experience other intellectually virtuous affections. Might it, then, be a mistake to think of these affections as an element or dimension of intellectual virtues?

Page 99 is a representative sample of Inquiry & Agency. The book explores the nature, structure, and evaluative status of intellectual virtues and vices. It treats intellectual virtues – such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility – as having four primary dimensions, one of which is an affective dimension. The key idea is that to possess an intellectual virtue in its fullness, one must be disposed to experience certain fitting affections in connection with its exercise. Virtuously open-minded people, for instance, aren’t merely willing to explore alternative perspectives; as a general rule, they enjoy doing so. This disposition says something important and favorable about who they are as persons.

However, this feature of intellectual virtues gives rise to some difficult questions: for instance, given that we don’t have direct voluntary control over our affections, how can they reflect favorably or negatively on who we are as persons? How can they contribute to our personal worth?

These issues are representative of the book as a whole in two ways. First, while the chapter that contains page 99 explores the affective dimension of intellectual virtues, several additional chapters offer similar treatments of the other primary dimensions of an intellectual virtue: namely, competence, motivational, and judgment dimensions. Second, a recurring theme throughout the book is whether or in what sense intellectual virtues and vices – understood as qualities that necessarily contribute positively or negatively to our personal worth – can be a matter of luck. I argue that while intellectual virtues are immune to certain forms of luck (e.g. environmental luck), they are consistent with other forms (e.g. constitutive luck).

Visit Jason Baehr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue