Twenty years ago, when the Critical Quarterly and I were young, and Milan Kundera was writing The Joke and wondering, no doubt, whether he would be allowed to publish it, it's very unlikely that I would have been asked, or, if asked, agreed, to write a critical article about a Czech novelist. The defiant, I-Like-It-Here provincialism of the Movement, the jealous guarding of the English Great Tradition by Leavis and his disciples, and the New Criticism's focus on stylistic nuance in literary texts, all militated against taking a professional interest in foreign writing. I was never under the spell of Leavis, but I was a literary child of the 1950s, and, as a critic, I was committed to the kind of close reading that, it seemed, could only be performed on and in one's mother tongue. In Language of Fiction (1966) I argued that meaning was as inseparable from...