Critical injuries

A decade ago, a publisher produced a set of short biographies of Britain’s 20th-century prime ministers, which I reviewed unenthusiastically. My wife reproved me: ‘What did you do that for? For a fee of a few hundred pounds you have made a dozen entirely gratuitous new enemies. If you don’t have something good to say about books, don’t write about them.’

Honest reviewing would grind to a halt if all its practitioners deferred to her advice. It is nonetheless true that victims of an unfavourable notice seldom forget or forgive. As authors, we commit our souls as well as our bodies. Memories of the most flattering reviews of my own books fade within hours. Yet wounds from the stinkers fester for years. American academics are especially generous heapers of camel-dung upon titles that fail to satisfy them.

In reflective moments on the bus one asks oneself what on earth provoked the animosity of this or that critic, being reluctant to acknowledge the possibility that maybe one’s book was simply not good enough. Fellow authors presumably muse likewise about me, as a reviewer, when tables are turned. On becoming editor of the Daily Telegraph back in 1986, I found myself obliged to part with many of its staff, including the paper’s elderly air correspondent. Seven years earlier he had penned a withering notice of my first big book, about the RAF’s bomber offensive in the second world war. This did not influence the decision to dispense with his services, but I should not be surprised if he supposed that it did.

Authors who know how modest are the places that we occupy on the foothills of Parnassus — which means most of us — draw solace from knowledge that more important folk have exposed the same sensitivity, Keats and Tennyson to name but two.