Book reviews, John Updike once wrote, ‘perform a clear and desired social service: they excuse us from reading the books themselves’. It’s a theory, I’m afraid, that doesn’t apply to this review — but it certainly does to this book: an impeccably wide-ranging collection of Ferdinand Mount’s own non-fiction reviews, including for The Spectator, over three decades.
Find yourself unaccountably vague on the premiership of Lord Rosebery? A little rusty on the life of George Gissing? Embarrassingly patchy on the history of Methodism? Thanks to Mount, there’s no need to plough through 500 pages on any of them — nor the more than 50 other subjects he covers. Now you can simply set aside a few minutes to read one of these elegant, measured and unassailably well-informed pieces instead.
Of course, in 30 years of reviewing, Mount does occasionally repeat a few trusty tactics. He’s quite fond, for instance, of quoting somebody’s verdict on somebody else — Kingsley Amis denouncing Elizabeth Jane Howard’s self-centredness, say — before turning it back on them, sometimes with the words, ‘Well, it takes one.’
And as it turns out, that same phrase often springs to mind while reading Mount himself — not least when he points out Walter Bagehot’s ability to ‘pick up any subject and give it a high bright gloss, leaving his readers confident that they now knew all they needed to know about it’.
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