Christopher Ricks's new book makes available many of his distinguished lectures given in the Eighties and Nineties. The essays retain a sense of occasion, and of a star performance on Ricks's part, while the book has been designed with the aggressive sobriety that signals a class act. Presumably it was the author who decreed that the title, in defiance of commercial logic, should give no clue to the contents, and who dispensed with routine enticements such as a subtitle and Preface, so that there's no short-cut to finding what the book is about. The contents page, impassively giving each lecture's title, doesn't section off genres or centuries. There is one merciful concession to academic convenience, an index of proper names.

LRB 1 August 1996 | PDF Download