That’s Right, BBC, We Need More Cultural Critics, Not Fewer

As the Beeb U-turns and decides not to cut Radio 4’s Saturday Review, we still need reviews – though things have changed drastically. “In the 19th century lengthy reviews flourished to such a degree that Thomas Carlyle predicted ‘by and by it will be found that all literature has become one boundless self-devouring review.’ It didn’t quite happen but many of the modernists – Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence – are as celebrated for their critical essays as for their poems or novels.”