From Charles Lamb to ‘netiquette’

A few years ago the American author Anne Fadiman scored a hit with Ex Libris, an amiable miscellany of book-talk touching lightly on such topics as the quirks of proof-reading and the vicissitudes of plagiarism. The subject matter of her new book, At Large and At Small, is much more varied, but the flavour is scarcely less literary. It is a collection of essays, designed to illustrate the continuing possibilities of what used to be known as the familiar essay — the bundle of personal reflections of which the most famous exponent was Charles Lamb.

Familiar essays, cherished in their heyday by belletrists and inflicted on generations of schoolchildren, have long since lost favour as a literary form. But Fadiman isn’t afraid of being thought old-fashioned. She even tells us that she has ‘a monumental crush’ on Lamb, and one can’t help admiring her for proclaiming the fact so boldly. It costs nothing, in 2007, to heap praise on Samuel Beckett, let’s say, or Virginia Woolf.