Any follower of literary blood sports should take a look at a review in the Weekly Standard, a conservative American magazine. You can find it on a site called Arts & Letters, which my son obligingly bookmarked for me. The present edition — at least I suppose it is the present one, not that it matters, since I understand that you can use the internet to summon articles from the vasty deep of time past — features the review, by Joseph Epstein of Sir Frank Kermode’s 2007 Clark Lectures devoted to E. M. Forster. Forster’s own book, Aspects of the Novel, had its origins in the same Cambridge lectures.
Epstein has armed himself with a two- barrelled shotgun, one barrel for Kermode, the other for Forster, whom he admits to having admired in his youth.
Kermode is gunned down first as a timid and conventional critic, incapable of offering anything but received opinion.
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