John Carey's new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities. The enemy has stayed the same - roughly, overweening literary Modernism. Has Carey's curious Oxonian populism truly changed, or just, as it were, moved colleges?

LRB 8 March 2001 | PDF Download