The bulk of this 432-page tome, leaving aside a few longer essays, random journalism and two commentaries for TV documentaries, consists of book reviews penned by the author for the Guardian, Observer, London Review of Books and, more recently, The Independent on Sunday. Now a big name himself, he has been commenting for the last decade on the style and work of all the other big names.

As a regular reader of the first three of these publications, much of the material which occupies these pages is familiar, but since the author and his tragic predicament have become the subject of numerous PhD theses, scholarly and not-so-scholarly debates, etc, there is, I suppose, some merit in having