fly-at-all

Updated: July 31, 2026

It had the refreshing audacity, the fly-at-all character of youth and of intellectual opposition to established ideas; it was, if even from the first not free from partisanship, at any rate not chargeable with the dull venal unfairness of the mere bookseller's hack who attacks Mr. Bungay's books because he is employed by Mr. Bacon, or vice versa.

George Saintsbury - A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)