Out of the jiffybag

Frank Kermode

  • For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1969-1987 by Jonathan Raban
    Collins Harvill, 350 pp, £11.50, November 1987, ISBN 0 00 272279 8
  • Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969-1986 by John Carey
    Faber, 278 pp, £9.95, August 1987, ISBN 0 571 14879 4

Here begins a review of two books which are largely collections of reviews, and some readers, reviewing it, are sure to ask whether this flea-on-flea process is desirable or even tolerable. My feeling is that such criticism is prejudiced. That which appears in the ephemerae isn’t necessarily ephemeral. Not all reviews are written lefthandedly by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form.

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