"Sing a song of critics, pockets full of lye. Four and twenty critics, hope that you will die. Hope that you will peter out, hope that you will fail ..." wrote a fuming Ernest Hemingway to a Mr Lee Wilson Dodd who'd given his story collection Men Without Women a bad review.
In a perfect world, of course, critics who actually criticise wouldn't exist. Books would be reviewed by writers whose only impulses would be to appreciate their finer points and stay quiet about their shortcomings. But how dull that would be. It's a sobering reflection on human nature that we are hard-wired to enjoy - to absolutely love, in a wriggling and delicious way - a truly knocking review, especially of an established author.
It's not just a matter of being rude about someone's prose style, however. Reviewers who are rude without being insightful aren't satisfying - as we know from the online muggers who like to rubbish absolutely everything about a book.
The best reviewers of the past - the Connollys, Burgesses, Orwells - combined wit and learning with a reliable bulls**t detector and an evident, if lightly worn, moral sense, so that their judgements were more than merely aesthetic assessment, and their hatchet jobs were occasions of awe.
The perfect knocking review should be more like an execution than a fist fight - simple and judicious rather than flailing and bloody, logical and terminal rather than a series of random blows with the victim only in intensive care.
