SOURCE: Lamb, Richard. “The Journalist and the Bore.” New Leader 82, no. 4 (5 April 1999): 17-18.

In the following review, Lamb asserts that Malcolm fails to make McGough's innocence convincing in The Crime of Sheila McGough.

As a writer, Janet Malcolm is chiefly interested in betrayal, and in the stories we tell ourselves and others to facilitate it. Her taste is that of a connoisseur, so while seduction or garden variety fraud might intrigue her, she prefers the sort of apostasy that somehow reflects the state of an entire profession, that can compromise careers. Thus her fascination, in her books, with watching Jeffrey Masson flamboyantly fail the litmus test on Freud's seduction theory and wilt professionally (he had been set to take over the Freud Archives). Or with watching the small, hurtful deceptions of a marriage explode into large irremediable acts coloring Ted Hughes' reputation as a poet as well as...