Critic of the year: James Ley won this year’s Pascall Prize.
Critic of the year: James Ley won this year’s Pascall Prize. Photo: Simon Schluter
The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James WoodJAMES LEY
Bloomsbury, 
This lucid and absorbing book began as a doctoral thesis for the University of Western Sydney, for which I acted as an external examiner. By the time he embarked on his thesis, James Ley had established a reputation as a respected book reviewer and literary essayist. The skill, taste and discrimination Ley brings to his critical writing are fully evident in this book, which, in a sense, reviews reviewers.
As a doctoral dissertation, The Critic in the Modern World was unusual for its day. The academic study of literature in recent decades has been most frequently concerned with a mysterious pursuit called "theory", a line of inquiry that has much in common with certain modes of philosophical speculation. Literature itself often seems no more than incidental to the preoccupations of theory-based criticism.
Still relevant: Samuel Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Still relevant: Samuel Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Ley, by contrast, turned his attention to an older conception of the nature and purpose of literary criticism: mediating between books and their authors and the general non-specialist (though by no means ignorant or uncultivated) public. By way of essays on four canonical figures and two slightly lesser known and less influential critics, Ley has, in effect, written a broad, multi-faceted survey of literary criticism in English since the 18th century. In this published (and I think only very slightly revised) form,The Critic in the Modern World confirms Ley's position as one of the most accomplished and stylish critics of recent decades.