Stooping to conquer

Anthony Lane has been film critic for the New Yorker since 1993, and the light lash of his humour is waspish and urbane in its New Yorker-ese. Nobody’s Perfect, a collection of his film and literary criticism, including author profiles and essays, is a glory. Throughout, Lane upholds the sterling virtue of good writing combined with wit and emotional engagement. But he makes no claim to be right about anything. ‘Nobody’s perfect’, as Osgood Fielding III chuckles in Some Like it Hot.

Lane is a 40-year-old Englishman who knows the work of every American writer and director from Hawthorne to Preston Sturges. And to judge by his zingy prose, he has a taste for the New Yorker’s old stalwarts E. B. White and James Thurber. If Graham Greene as film critic for The Spectator was often contemptuous of the American movie industry, Lane is happy to applaud such Hollywood weepies as Now, Voyager.