SOURCE: "Matters of Decorum," in The Times Educational Supplement, No. 3862, July 6, 1990, p. 26.

In the excerpt below, Kemp praises Raine's "exhilarating and engrossing" criticism in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet, concluding that "it is almost always stirringly alive to the procedures and possibilities of creativity."

[Anthony] Powell's Pall Mall prose, meticulous concurrence with the conservative, and pained recoil from the irreverent lower-class energies of Wells, Twain and their like [in his Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946–1989] put him at the opposite extreme as a critic to Craig Raine. Where Powell exudes commendation for the genteel, Raine cordially abominates it. One of his most elegantly edged pieces in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet slices into the petrified propriety and frigid diction of Augustan poetry to expose stultified responses.

The imitative and remote from life regularly incur cutting comment. An elevated 18th-century poem about a washerwoman's day—"At length bright Sol...