Professor Enright apologetically suggests that some of the short articles and reviews he has collected in [Conspirators and Poets] could 'scarcely be called "literary criticism."' By the standard he himself set in the best essays in his previous collection, The Apothecary's Shop, that may be true. But the apology can be read in more ways than one. When he writes in one of these pieces that the symbolism in John Updike's novels is

all very neat and contrived, as if some sophisticate is amusedly performing for a psychiatrist of low intelligence

—that, we can't help agreeing, is certainly not literary criticism of the kind we have become most familiar with. It is too swift, too witty, too decisive; it uses everyday experience to effect, in a manner carefully avoided by most writers on contemporary literature in the professional academic reviews. The fact is—to paraphrase the old joke about Shakespeare's comedies being better than other people's tragedies—that Mr Enright's journalism is often more to the point than other people's criticism….

[With few exceptions] Conspirators and Poets deals entirely with 20th-century writers. The author fights or snipes on many fronts. In turn he tries to rescue literature from the academics, from the ideologists, from the fashion-mongers, from the moralists, from the sociologists manqué; and then, quite as spiritedly, repudiates the advances of the aesthetes, the dilettantes, the sub-Flaubertians, those who think of 'words as an end in themselves' and of art as a refuge from life's disorder and unseemliness.

If he is likely to displease critics and university teachers by attacking them for the 'mountainous molehills of criticism' which they are raising in every direction, he also makes pretty short shrift of some of our recent rebels and their causes….

However, it would be quite wrong to give the impression that the book is entirely, or even mainly, deflationary in tone. The author is always ready to acknowledge the merits of the work he cares for least, and elsewhere in the book he writes gratefully and gracefully about the achievements of many other contemporary or near-contemporary figures: Thomas Mann, C. P. Cavafy, Dr Leavis, Italo Svevo, Mary McCarthy (though he excludes The Group from his approval), Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence as a poet, Wilfred Owen, Gunther Grass. These writers' gifts are enormously different in kind and magnitude, but the praise Mr Enright gives to each of them never diminishes the value or meaning of that accorded to the others. One curious and paradoxical consequence of the journalistic origin of a few of the pieces, however, is that one feels them to be more allusive, more bookish, than a straight, formal critical essay might have been. We don't get Enright on Mann, for instance, but rather Enright on a book by Erich Heller about Mann … and so on. Which is a pity, especially as allusions and covert references to other writers abound in the essays anyway. 'Most of us,' Mr Enright says, in defence of literary journalism, 'don't have more than two thousand words' worth to say on most topics.' Here we have an exception propounding a rule—and then sticking to it. It is hard to decide, finally, whether he is to be applauded or chided for doing so.