Sam Leith Sam Leith

Look! Shakespeare! Wow! George Eliot! Criminy! Jane Austen!

John Sutherland isn't known for subtlety, so use his Little History of Literature as a galloping guidebook

Top of the happiness scale: Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (English School, 15th century). Getty Images 
issue 16 November 2013

Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island Story and A Brief History of Time and, in content, Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Other notable precursors are How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland, How to be Well Read by John Sutherland, 50 Literature Ideas You Need To Know by John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland and more in that vein. The tireless and compendious Dr Johnson — ‘the first great critic of English literature’ — deserves and receives a chapter to himself here, and it’s no great surprise that the tireless and compendious Professor Sutherland entirely sees the point of him.

One marmalade-dropper to pause and mull on: ‘The average literate person reads 600 works of literature in an adult lifetime.’ That does not seem all that many at all — maybe ten a year.

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