Although we are told that the average attention span is reduced to a matter of seconds, literary life continues to favour the marathon runner at the expense of the sprinter. No one in his right mind would have expected Nicholas Hilliard to paint the Sistine Chapel, yet publishers persist in their attempts to persuade short-story writers to try their hand at a novel. American-style universities, more interested in bulk than quality, cite publication as a measure of academic advancement, quite forgetting that a 5,000-word essay by Isaiah Berlin or Hugh Trevor-Roper – neither of whom, oddly enough, is included in Ian Hamilton’s admirable anthology – will almost certainly be worth a whole lorryload of reheated PhDs, or that many of the best dons never put pen to paper. Nor are writers themselves immune to this fixation with the full-length work: Cyril Connolly – one of life’s short-distance men, and all the better for it – was agonised by his failure to produce a book that wasn’t, in essence, a collation of glittering shards, and spent time and ingenuity arranging reprinted essays and book reviews in such a way as to promote the notion of solidity and permanence. (It is good to report that Connolly is on display here, casting a waspish eye over the machinations of London literary life, as seen by an idealistic young American writer, ‘hugging a thimble of something warm and sweet with a recoil like nail-polish remover’ at a postwar publishing party.)

‘The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything’, declared Aldous Huxley, whose own contribution is a rather drivelling conceit about the similarities between cats and men: very much the kind of whimsical, Times fourth-leader exercise that Connolly rightly ridiculed in the early chapters of Enemies of Promise, in which he conjures up a pipe-smoking, slipper-clad, purple-nosed hack settling down in the study of his country cottage to knock out 700 words on ‘The First Cuckoo of Spring’ or ‘The Life of a Dog’. Such outpourings proliferated between the wars, and, this being a collection of twentieth-century essays, Hamilton has included some token entries, including A P Herbert on bathrooms, and Desmond MacCarthy – who himself embodied the hack as a Dreadful Warning – on the transience of literary fame.

Most of the pieces assembled here are a good deal fiercer and tougher than these, and cunningly combine varying degrees of literary excellence with telling insights into the history and culture of our times: the best – like Dan Jacobson’s marvellous description of arriving in London from South Africa in the early 1950s, Mary McCarthy’s confession of her time as a wayward Communist, Christopher Hitchens’s belated discovery of his Jewish antecedents, or James Baldwin’s harrowing ‘Notes of a Native Son’ – grow from autobiography and personal experience to more generalised conclusions. John Carey’s wonderfully caustic ‘Down with Dons’ is another fine example, interlacing his own irritation at the arrogance and self-importance of his fellow-academics with trenchant musings on the value of universities in general, and Sir Maurice Bowra in particular.

Although V S Pritchett is, alas, absent from the feast, lit. crit. of various kinds is represented by Edmund Wilson, W H Auden, Randall Jarrell, Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’). Those alarmed at the notion of F R Leavis may be reassured to learn that ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’ is more readable and less infuriating than expected, and horribly relevant in these days of ‘dumbing down’. Hannah Arendt’s famous essay on concentration camps, on the other hand, is abstract to the point of unintelligibility – lacking, as it does, the pragmatic, personal note that is such a feature of this Anglo-American collection.

The best anthologies tend to include old chestnuts and unfamiliar items, and this is no exception. The chestnuts include Orwell’s ‘England, Your England’, Naipaul’s ‘In the Middle of the Journey’, Fitzgerald’s ‘The Crackup’, ‘The Secret Life of James Thurber’, Lytton Strachey on Dr Coldbatch, Graham Greene’s ‘The Lost Childhood’ and Nancy Mitford on U and non-U; less familiar, perhaps, are Christopher Isherwood on the lugubrious German playwright Ernst Toiler, Joan Didion on falling out of love with New York, and the mighty Koestler on the perils of magic mushrooms.

Dating is, inevitably, a worry where essays are concerned, and whereas Edmund Blunden on the Battle of the Somme, and Paul Fussell’s modest memoir about his role in the Battle of the Ardennes, both read as freshly as ever, some more recent items – Tom Wolfe on Radical Chic, Norman Mailer on the Hipster, Gore Vidal on the Kennedys, Jonathan Raban on his revolt against his father – bear a faint, dispiriting whiff of kipper ties and flares.

Good essayists tend to be neat-minded folk, eager to make order out of chaos within a narrow measure, to float ideas and tie up loose ends simultaneously, and – as often as not – to end up where they started. Few forms of writing give greater pleasure than an intelligent, well-written and carefully constructed essay, and if Ian Hamilton’s collection persuades publishers, academics, literary editors and readers in general to share his (and my) enthusiasm, he will not have anthologised in vain.