Reviewing a collection of book reviews calls for caution. It would be a bold—or a boastful—reviewer who claimed to recognise his own virtues in Miss McCarthy's work [The Writing on the Wall]. Not many of us can swing into action so brightly, or riffle so fast through literature to reinforce a provocative generalisation, or work so closely with a drily cerebral text, as she does at her best. But her faults are the profession's common property. Almost all of us have thrown out a fine opening sentence without considering where it will lead us; have been given more space than we really have thoughts to fill, or not allowed ourselves enough time to fill the space; have allowed a phrase to take over a train of thought, or to patch the gap in an argument…. The critic, says Miss McCarthy in a review of Nathalie Sarraute...