Good reviews, of course, please writers greatly, but not as greatly as bad reviews upset them. Writers are an irritable tribe, and remember a bad review with tenacity and bitterness long after the good ones are forgotten. Since it is a rare book that does not encounter at least one reviewer with a hangover, or who has just had a domestic quarrel, or who has been selected by the review editor for a known antipathy to the author, it is a rare scribbler who does not carry somewhere the quietly or otherwise suppurating wound inflicted by barbs of criticism.

Since all authors receive their share of such, they do best to accept them as hazards of the trade. The chief reason is the obvious one that no one can please everyone all the time; and anyway there are people out there who refuse to be pleased at all. So