Christmas funny books

Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but only by unstoppering a phial and waggling it under a person’s nose can you convey what the scent is like. It’s a similar case with poetry. You can prattle away about felicitous rhymes (assuming there are any), striking imagery, passion, depth and concentration of meaning (John Betjeman called poetry ‘the shorthand of the heart’); but if you fail to give an example of the verse, you can achieve little more than someone who says a violet smells sweet or damns the odours from a sewage farm as ‘effluvia’.

Much the same principle applies to reviewers of humorous (and would-be humorous) books.