Critic at Large

D.J. Taylor is such a student of the machinations of Grub Street he even, glancingly, feels obliged to review this book, a collection of his pieces for various literary magazines over the past decade. If not offering quite a full diagnosis, he is, at least, unable to ‘ignore the faint air of defensiveness that rises over these compilations, born of a suspicion that the book review, as opposed to the critical essay… has a necessarily short shelf-life’. There’s truth to that, but luckily the work collected here is, on the whole, something slightly more ambitious than the term ‘book review’ may initially conjure, not least because the art of the review has changed rather dramatically during Taylor’s now three-decades long writing life. Taylor started out, he writes, in the promisingly titled piece ‘Why Review Books?’ in a period where reviewing was ‘becoming a blood sport again’: literary coverage was wide and wide-ranging, and critics were allowed, even tacitly expected, to cultivate an air of scepticism, if not outright hostility, towards the offerings being scrutinised. Things have changed a fair bit since those relatively heady days of both space and appetite, however, and, as Taylor mournfully notes of the current ‘landscape’, ‘we inhabit a world in which most books are not so much reviewed as endorsed’.

Taylor’s is a more robust approach, as he demonstrates throughout this gathering of articles. A sharp noticer, broadly and deeply read, he is able to look both ways, bringing an air of scrupulous entertainment and historical grounding to the process, remembering that a reader’s attention is never a given, and nor ...