This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

It is just after 10.30 on a chill January morning at the University of Clacton, and with the Interwar Class (Woolf, Eliot, Pound) safely disposed of and the Post-Colonial Voices seminar (Selvon, Emecheta, Rushdie) arriving at 11am, Dr Max Grubb, comfortably ensconced in his departmental office, is hard at work on a letter.

“Dear Mr X,” he writes, with a formality as glacial as the January morning, “Having read your review of the Lawrence letters in the Spectator, I feel it my duty to protest at the highly inadequate treatment of his dealings with Lady Ottoline Morrell. In fact, it seemed to me that your knowledge of Lawrence’s life and work, let alone the philosophical grounding that underpins it, was woefully insufficient for the task in hand … ”

The letter, when complete, will run to several closely typed pages. Mr X, on receipt, will simply throw it in the waste-paper bin, but Max is convinced these “interventions” are a vital part of academe’s mission to rebuke what he will sometimes refer to as “the light-minded and catchpenny reviewing establishment”.

He is a tall, spindly and prematurely grey-haired man in his late thirties, lately risen to the post of Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century Studies with all the departmental responsibilities such a post implies. But, as he will confess, he is wholly absorbed by his extra-curricular hobby of writing to people.

Some of these letters, naturally, are to newspapers and literary magazines. The London Review of Books is his park and pleasaunce, and the Times Literary Supplement once allowed him a whole column to complain about “the jejune anti-metaphysical undertow” of a review of a biography of Iris Murdoch.

The victims of his acerbity are multifarious — anyone from the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature (“Why must he be so obtuse?”) to the compilers of fiction round-ups — although it may be noted that the vast majority of them are male reviewers slightly younger than Max whose “immaturity” he is keen to belabour.

The review he wrote was returned by the literary editor on grounds of obscurity

What does Max want? Why, rigour, “genuine engagement”, pluralism, a determination to expose establishment neglect of marginal presences.

He would be happy to supply some of these highly desirable qualities himself, but the review he wrote for the New Statesman of Sally Rooney’s last novel, praising it for “the sharp, serrated edge of its ontological tools” was returned by the literary editor on grounds of obscurity.

10.59 now and the students, whom Max frankly despises for never doing any work and wanting careers in IT recruitment, are due.

One of these days, he tells himself, he will get out that PhD thesis he wrote about Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell (“Hydra Head: Modernism’s Authenticating Force”) and see whether it can’t be turned into a book.

Meanwhile, there is a keen anticipatory pleasure in the thought of writing to the Sunday Times to lament Johanna Thomas-Corr’s latest misstep. Nicola, his graduate student partner, is young enough to be impressed by all this, listens wide-eyed to the breakfast table harangues and thinks that Max’s talents are cruelly ignored.