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One of the reprinted reviews which make up the bulk of this book opens: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Eton.’ How would it sound, I mused, if I began a review: ‘I vividly remember when I first read George Orwell. It was at Colchester Grammar School.’

It would lack, I feel, that enviable tone of Etonian ‘assurance’. True, a less self-assured person than James Wood might have slipped his educational credentials in parenthetically — in the style of David Cameron’s casual remark that he is ‘reasonably well off’. And Eton, one notes in passing, has produced many more prime ministers than great literary critics. Connolly, Orwell (at a stretch), and who else?

Well, of course, James Wood. He is, as the puffball endorsements clustered on every spare centimetre in the front and back covers of this book testify, ‘the most urgent and morally demanding critic around’, ‘a superb critic’, ‘the most influential critic of his generation’.

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Douglas Murray

Why were the Abedis here in the first place?

The encomia grate a little on those thereby consigned to Lilliputian stature. It’s intensified by a recurrent pharisaical note in Wood’s own writing. His (astute) essay on Alan Hollinghurst opens: ‘Most of the prose writers acclaimed for writing beautifully do no such thing.’ It throws back an echo, heard throughout the volume, of ‘Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other reviewers are with their thoughtless acclamations.’

Wood’s high-handedness typically takes the form of talking miles over the head of the reader and yards to the side of whomever he’s writing about. Consider the following sentence. Who, do you guess, is the subject of the piece in which it figures? ‘Georges Bataille has some haunting words (in Erotism) about how the workplace is the scene of our domestication and repression: it is where we are forced to put away our Dionysianism.