Sam Leith Sam Leith

Reviewing reviews of reviews — where will it all end? 

In Lives in Writing, David Lodge writes about Pico Iyer writing about Graham Greene, and about Martin Stannard writing about Muriel Spark, and so on...

From left to right: Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and H.G. Wells [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 25 January 2014

About halfway through reading this collection of essays I had one of those hall-of-mirrors moments. These are mostly book reviews, you see: high-toned, long-form New York Review of Books-type review-essays, given — but book reviews nevertheless. There I was, dutifully noting what David Lodge wrote about what Martin Stannard had to say about Muriel Spark, for instance.

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