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.

Inspired — if that is the right word — by a piece in the Literary Review by D.J. Taylor (of this parish) the Secret Author recently shelled out for a copy of Piers Brendon’s memoir of Tom Sharpe.

In his day, Mr Sharpe (1928–2013) was a celebrated comic novelist, much televised and translated, and yet the fascination of Tom Sharpe: A Personal Memoir (Peach Publishing) turned out to rest not so much on Brendon’s take on the various neuroses which seemed to underpin his subject’s considerable oeuvre, as on his analysis of the literary marketplace in which Sharpe made his equally considerable living.

Of particular interest, to anyone beguiled by the protocols of bygone Grub Street, was some of Brendon’s reportage from the 1970s reviewing circuit. What happened when Sharpe wrote a novel? Well, good or bad, best-selling or not, it tended to be noticed by some very serious people.

Blott on the Landscape (1975), for example, was appraised by Nina Bawden in the Daily Telegraph and Janice Elliott in the Sunday ditto. Its successor Wilt (1976) sailed off into even more exalted critical climes, with David Lodge noticing it in the Times Literary Supplement and Anthony Thwaite in the Observer.

For the benefit of younger readers, bemused by this cavalcade of half-century-old lustre and éclat, it should be said that Nina Bawden and Janice Elliott were highly regarded novelists, Anthony Thwaite a distinguished poet and the keeper of Philip Larkin’s flame, whilst David Lodge — still with us at the age of 89 — was and is one of the most eminent writer-critics of his generation.

Sharpe, in other words, was being reviewed by his peers. The modern equivalent would be, say, Jonathan Coe reviewing the new Zadie Smith or Colm Tóibín set to work on the latest Alan Hollinghurst.

Does this kind of thing happen now? No, it doesn’t. There are several reasons why big serious writers and critics (with a few gallant exceptions) no longer review for the national press.

One of them is that the national press has lost the critical authority it used to have in an era of six- and seven-figure circulations before the punditry of cyberspace kicked in.

The second is the fact that the money isn’t good enough. The third is that contemporary fear of giving offence. Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess never minded ticking off fellow writers they reckoned had underperformed, but most modern practitioners would sooner steal money from a down-and-out’s plastic cup than be detected in the act of giving Zadie a bad review.

The consequence is that most book reviewing is done by younger critics who suffer from what in the past used to be thought the disabling disadvantage of not having published a book themselves — people who can certainly talk the talk but have not yet, as the saying goes, walked the walk.

All the same, anyone who supposes that here is yet another golden age, plunged into debased modern torpor, is counselled to hold their fire. For, when closely inspected, the golden age of old-style Sharpe-era book-reviewing turns out to be horribly suspect.

Take the Observer books pages of 50 and 60 years ago, when they were edited by the great Terry Kilmartin and featured such luminaries of the art as Burgess, Angus Wilson, Lorna Sage and D.J. Enright.

A nest of singing birds, surely, by whom it must have been a pleasure to be reviewed? Well, no, actually, for as Miriam Gross’ account of her time as Kilmartin’s deputy, given in An Almost English Life (2012), demonstrates in abundance, many of these grand panjandrums had the greatest difficulty in producing literary journalism and frequently had to have their work rewritten for them.

Wilson’s reviews, Gross reveals, were “dashed off in barely legible handwriting … They contained no punctuation and very little in the way of syntax and style”.

It may well have been, as Gross assures us, that Wilson’s opinions were “interesting and original”, but she and Kilmartin were compelled to spend long hours refashioning the pieces in “words and cadences that Angus Wilson himself might have used”.

The Secret Author was party to a similar revelation 30 years ago when mentioning to the then fiction editor of the Sunday Times how much he had enjoyed a coruscating piece by a flamboyant woman journalist (whom I had better not name as she is still about) only to be told that an entire afternoon had had to be spent getting it into a fit state for publication.

Given that no modern literary editor would have the time to perform these arduous tasks, I think we can assume that the book reviewers of the 2020s file pretty serviceable copy. Whatever their apparent inexperience as writers, the finished results are invariably worth reading.

As far as the Secret Author can see, Claire Lowdon, Leo Robson, Johanna Thomas-Corr and Houman Barekat — to name a quartet of steely modern reviewers — have only written one novel between them. Who cares? The kids are alright.