SOURCE: “Auberon Waugh on New Novels,” in Spectator, January 23, 1971, p. 130.

In the following review, Waugh offers a positive assessment of Mr. Bone's Retreat, calling the novel “more skillfully constructed and better written than any of its predecessors."

The reviewer's role has always seemed to me an essentially humble one, his relationship to the reading public rather the same as that of a taster at some Renaissance court to his Prince. Our only absolute obligation is to read the book. Thereafter, if we turn green and die in great pain, prudent members of the reading public will leave the book alone. All people really require from a reviewer is that he briefly describes what sort of book it is—whether it attempts to bloodcurdle, to amuse, to excite sexually, to provoke compassionate or romantic feelings, to stimulate the intelligence, to advance some political philosophy or to propound an entirely...