This book collects fifty of Christopher Ricks' reviews from newspapers and journals on both sides of the Atlantic—TLS, London Review of Books, The New Statesman, The Sunday Times (London), The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and others—to several of which he has been a regular contributor. The book's five sections range around the twentieth century, addressing major figures in biography (Ackroyd, Edel, Ellmann, Mailer), poetry and fiction (Heaney, Hemingway, Milosz, Naipaul, Pound), literary criticism and theory (Davie, Empson, Fiedler, Fish, Leavis, Sartre), sociology and cultural studies (Goffman, Milgram, Steiner), and various non-literary arts (the Beatles, Steinberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Wiseman). The questions at the heart of Ricks' work as reviewer have always been essential ones: What can we learn from this book? How good and how pleasing is it? How might it have been better? Radiantly intelligent, learned, witty, and rigorously attentive to how words are used and to the arguments they are used to make, Christopher Ricks is for many the best critic now writing in English. "Reading Professor Ricks' comments and observations convinces me that he is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding." –W.H. Auden "Like perfect goodness or perfect disinterestedness, the perfect review is an impossible ideal. Of all the people I know, Christopher Ricks has come the closest to achieving it." –Wendy Lesser, Los Angeles Times Book Review