A range of book reviewers’ clichés was held up to mockery 60 years ago, in a letter by Jocelyn Brooke to The Spectator. Brooke (1908-66) was a strange man who thought he had found his vocation in the venereal disease branch of the Royal Army Medical Corps until he burst into authorship, publishing two books a year from 1949 to 1958.
One reviewers’ cliché he singled out was the use of the adjective jejune.
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