Sam Leith Sam Leith

Look! Shakespeare! Wow! George Eliot! Criminy! Jane Austen!

John Sutherland isn't known for subtlety, so use his Little History of Literature as a galloping guidebook

Top of the happiness scale: Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (English School, 15th century). Getty Images

Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island Story and A Brief History of Time and, in content, Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Other notable precursors are How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland, How to be Well Read by John Sutherland, 50 Literature Ideas You Need To Know by John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland and more in that vein. The tireless and compendious Dr Johnson — ‘the first great critic of English literature’ — deserves and receives a chapter to himself here, and it’s no great surprise that the tireless and compendious Professor Sutherland entirely sees the point of him.

One marmalade-dropper to pause and mull on: ‘The average literate person reads 600 works of literature in an adult lifetime.’ That does not seem all that many at all — maybe ten a year. Timor mortis conturbat me. It’s only the most full-frontal of Sutherland’s many arguments that if we’re going to make the most of our reading lives there’s no harm in listening to some recommendations. Absent Dr Johnson himself, Sutherland is as good a guide as you could hope for. Here’s a romp through the history of literature from before the Iliad to the age of the Kindle.

Old Sutherland was never your man for close detail, mind. His version of Oscar Wilde’s quote on the death of Little Nell isn’t quite the familiar one; ‘from sea to shining sea’ becomes ‘from shining sea to shining sea’; and the first time he trots out Eliot’s line about humankind and reality, ‘very much’ has become ‘too much’. He translates e pluribus unum as ‘out of many, comes unity’ and il miglior fabbro as ‘the greater artist’.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in