There is something to be said against collecting old book-reviews—but not when they are as good as D. J. Enright's. Flaubert and Heinrich Böll, 'Earthly Powers' and 'A Dictionary of Catch Phrases,' 'The Golden Lotus' and E. B. White: coming from most reviewers, the pieces assembled in 'A Mania for Sentences' would simply represent so many fares picked up at the rank. But in Enright's case they cohere, bound together by a consistent (and consistently enlivening) approach and a distinctive tone of voice, and by the mixture of subtlety tempered by common sense (or vice versa) which makes him one of the most rewarding critics currently plying his trade.

He is also a master of the witty formulation, and the book would be worth reading for the jokes alone….

Some of Enright's finest comic moments are at the expense of criticism (other people's criticism) which has lost touch with reality. His wit also serves as a teaching-aid, since he sees his own brand of criticism as 'practical'—by which he means that it is of the kind which attempts to be of practical use to readers 'by describing, drawing out, comparing, concurring or quarrelling with the work it discusses.' All of which he himself does to excellent effect…. On the other hand he does not seem to have any very strong urge to erect a large self-aggrandising theory of literature….

What he does have is a keen sense of history, and more particularly of what history feels like at the receiving end. He warms to the Good Soldier Svejk; he writes amusingly about Chinese immigrants in cheap fiction (Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan) and thoughtfully about Chinese immigrants in complicated fact (the memoirs of Maxine Hong Kingston). He is also dedicated to the proposition that it takes more than one culture to make a world, while recognising just how tricky a business crossing a cultural boundary can be….

A small bundle of essays, among the best in the collection, are concerned with language. A contentious subject just now, when usage has a much harder time battling against abusage than it did in the old hierarchical days (whose language is it anyway?), when idioms are unmanned in the name of sexual equality and students of 'verbal aggression' are pushing back the frontiers of four-letter scholarship. As you would expect, Enright takes a sensible undogmatic view of things. Not all change, he reminds us, is decay, and some decay turns into new life; but slovenly is slovenly, and illiterate is illiterate, and a good deal of what passes itself off as change is mere floundering around.

One opportunity which he does not fail to seize is presented by a dictionary of obscure and unusual words….

There are many other miscellaneous pleasures in 'A Mania for Sentences'—if I had to single out one, it would be the funny and touching account of the ways in which a group of American five-year-olds responded to the stories told them in kindergarten, a reminder (among other things) of how well Enright has written about his own childhood in his sequence of poems 'The Terrible Shears.' Like everything else in the collection, it sets you thinking; like everything else it bears witness to the rival claims of fantasy and reality, and to the art through which they can sometimes be reconciled.