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’.
The encomia grate a little on those thereby consigned to Lilliputian stature.
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