Synopses & Reviews
This book collects fifty of Christopher Ricks' reviews from newspapers and journals on both sides of the AtlanticTLS, London Review of Books, The New Statesman, The Sunday Times (London), The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and othersto several of which he has been a regular contributor. The book's five sections range around the twentieth century, addressing major figures in biography (Ackroyd, Edel, Ellmann, Mailer), poetry and fiction (Heaney, Hemingway, Milosz, Naipaul, Pound), literary criticism and theory (Davie, Empson, Fiedler, Fish, Leavis, Sartre), sociology and cultural studies (Goffman, Milgram, Steiner), and various non-literary arts (the Beatles, Steinberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Wiseman).
The questions at the heart of Ricks' work as reviewer have always been essential ones: What can we learn from this book? How good and how pleasing is it? How might it have been better? Radiantly intelligent, learned, witty, and rigorously attentive to how words are used and to the arguments they are used to make, Christopher Ricks is for many the best critic now writing in English.
"Reading Professor Ricks' comments and observations convinces me that he is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."
–W.H. Auden
"Like perfect goodness or perfect disinterestedness, the perfect review is an impossible ideal. Of all the people I know, Christopher Ricks has come the closest to achieving it."
–Wendy Lesser, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
"Ricks takes seriously his duties as a sentinel of literature and wields his pen with determined force." NYT Book Review
Review
"Into that dreary bog of intellectual terrain known as literary criticism comes whistling Christopher Ricks." The Spectator
Review
"Ricks combines quotation, revelation, and admiration so beautifully and sparely that one feels air has been let into the world." Katherine Powers,
Synopsis
This book collects fifty of Christopher Ricks' reviews from newspapers and journals on both sides of the Atlantic
TLS, London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and others to several of which he has been a regular contributor. The book's five sections range around the twentieth century, addressing major figures in biography (Ackroyd, Edel, Ellmann, Mailer), poetry and fiction (Heaney, Hemingway, Milosz, Naipaul, Pound), literary criticism and theory (Davie, Empson, Fiedler, Fish, Leavis, Sartre), sociology and cultural studies (Goffman, Milgram, Steiner), and various non-literary arts (The Beatles, Steinberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Wiseman).
The questions at the heart of Ricks' work as reviewer have always been essential ones: What can we learn from this book? How good and how pleasing is it? Radiantly intelligent, learned, witty, and rigorously attentive to how words are used and to the arguments they are used to make, Christopher Ricks is for many the best critic now writing in English.