James's enthusiasm for great writing made him want to be a great writer, which, at his best, he just about is. Academics deploy their technocratic jargon against literature as a stern, roundheaded reproach to it. James's own lucid, witty, metaphorically vivid style is his grateful yet keenly competitive tribute to all those better makers whose work he analyses here - Orwell, Chandler, Eugenio Montale, Edmund Wilson or Barry Humphries who 'writes the most nutritiously rococo English'...

To compensate for the rowdy vulgarity of his ITV specials, James the populist has developed a precious, pedantic alter ego who is an occasional irritant in these essays... All the same, I finished this book wishing that I knew as much as James does, and that I wrote as well and (not suffering from the colonial cringe that used to be mandatory for Australian arrivistes in this country) I'm immodest enough to admit that I don't often feel that way when reading the work of other critics.