The titles of Desmond MacCarthy's books must have seemed to him unassailably offhand - Remnants, Portraits, Experience: titles nicely in tune with his well-known view of himself as a chap who could surely have done better. One of his favourite lines of poetry was Hartley Coleridge's 'For I have lost the race I never ran' and early on in his career he got used to being spoken of as having squandered a great gift. Part of MacCarthy's charm was that he had no serious quarrel with this view. In 1932, he decided - was persuaded - to issue a selection of the book reviews he had been turning out for the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. It was typical of the man that he should call it, simply, Criticism.

LRB 30 August 1990 | PDF Download