SOURCE: Young, Alan. Review of Orage as Critic, edited by Wallace Martin. Critical Quarterly 18, no. 1 (spring 1976): 84-6.

In the following review of Orage as Critic, edited by Wallace Martin, Young praises Orage's honesty and conviction of belief in his role as a cultural critic.

A. R. Orage (1873-1934) wrote weekly columns for Keir Hardie's The Labour Leader and for his own reviews The New Age and The New English Weekly. Wallace Martin has edited a selection from this writing [Orage as Critic] so that we may follow Orage's opinions as they developed on a number of important questions about critical attitudes, principles and methods, literary language, and the relationship between the arts and society.

The inevitable ‘bittiness’ of such regular short review journalism is more than compensated for by the editor's selection and skilful arrangement of the material and by the fact that Orage's thinking was naturally, directly...