The short topical review-article is a literary discovery of the last two hundred years or so - the age of mass literacy and the mass-circulation newspaper. A good review column is read by more people than any criticism at book length, and often deserves to be. It should have been the review and not the novel that Jane Austen meant when she hailed the form in which 'the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.' She might also have had reviewers in mind, not novelists, when she noted their extraordinary sheepishness in alluding to their own skills. Some of the very best are nowadays competing with one another in that ungenerous and impolitic custom 'of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding'.

LRB 22 January 1981 | PDF Download