There’s nothing wrong with plugging a friend’s book

The advantage of reviewing books by a friend is that you can invite him out for a walk across the South Downs and menace him with blunt questions. Books pages editors call this sort of thing ‘backscratching’ and ‘logrolling’, as if, instead of engaging in proper criticism, you and your mate had spent the time on a sauna holiday in Sweden. But cronyism lets you discover new things about writing, literature and yourself that are inaccessible to the ordinary critic.

Cornelius Medvei, whose father lives in Sussex, a few fields away from me, has published three novels. They are fables that are witty, wry and thin (in terms of pages) and nobody except Susan Hill and I reads them. The latest one, The Making of Mr Bolsover, is about a local politician who becomes a prophet and ends up living in a wood, cooking rats. On the back cover is a review of Medvei’s first novel, Mr Thundermug.