[The qualities evident in the essays which comprise The Myth Makers] are a catholic enthusiasm for literature, a clear, level-headed and pithy style, a versatile sympathy, and a complete freedom from jargon, cant, bullying, pirouetting and wisecracks—a combination of qualities the more impressive when one considers that this generosity of interest continues unnarrowed and fresh in an author almost in his eighties.

The disadvantages, as at least they must seem to the uninvited academic or 'serious' reader, are also those of the first occasion: much retelling of stories and lives in proportion to the comment on them; a too-ready acceptance of the going rate as to reputations (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Marquez, Borges all 'great'); and especially a willingness—it seems to me at once the life and the limitation of the book—to let all the purposes of criticism be served by the telling anecdote and the thumbnail...