V. S. Pritchett is not much given to quarreling with other critics, but at one point in his new collection of essays ["The Myth Makers"] he does allow himself to rebuke a professor who has been going in for some particularly jaw-breaking jargon, subjecting Flaubert to a barrage of "velleities" and "volitations." Literary criticism, he insists, "does not add to its status by opening an intellectual hardware store." Nor, one might add, by dealing in pseudoscientific fancy goods, or peddling unnecessary new systems of classification, or confining its activities to a structuralist boutique.

Pritchett himself, it need hardly be said, has never set up in the hardware line, while alongside the latest generation of pundits he can look as hopelessly old-fashioned as Hazlitt or Sainte-Beuve. An incorrigible journalist, he brings us the news about literature, whetting our appetite for unfamiliar authors, sending us back to books we thought...