Leaf through a newspaper’s art pages — almost any news- paper’s. The distinction, indeed the chasm, between the tone of the reviews of films and plays and those of books, is striking. For movie and theatre critics, the poisoned quill is as familiar as the preview plonk: ‘an insult to the intelligence of a four-year-old’, ‘the most embarrassing Shakespearean experience since Peter O’Toole’s Macbeth’, ‘a Hollywood nonsense to make one hanker for Schwartzenegger’. Most book reviews, by comparison, seem as genteel as a Trollopean curate’s wife: ‘a welcome addition to the historiography of Venice’, ‘whatever the author lacks in scholarly rigour is compensated for by her enthusiasm’. When a reviewer breaks this mould and gets rough, one is often prompted to speculate about a private subtext.
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