"A few years ago Raphael emailed Epstein with the suggestion that 'there might be some fun, not to mention $$$' in emailing each other for a year, then publishing the results. And so they get going, each of them dutifully delivering between 1,500 to 1,800 words a week, every week for a year. The first thing to be said about their exchanges is how extraordinarily unpleasant they are [...] Anyone unfamiliar with the literary world will, I think, be astonished at the ease with which these grand old men of letters turn into queeny old hairdressers, furiously bitching about their younger, prettier or more highly regarded rivals.

"When Ann Widdecombe appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010, the judges were not complimentary, describing her variously as "a dancing hippo", "a Dalek in drag" and "the Ark Royal". [...] Is Widdecombe's writing any better than her dancing? No. About the best you can say for her prose is that it is accurate. Her grammar is fine – Ann is a stickler for grammar – and her anecdotes make sense in that they have a beginning, a middle and an end. Her attention to detail is exemplary, if you're the kind of reader who really does long to know precisely where she stands on the matter of apostolic succession or Michael Howard's sacking of the former director of HM Prison Service, Derek Lewis. But in every other respect her memoirs bear a strong resemblance to her paso doble: no rhythm, no beauty, no humour and, above all, no feeling."

"[One must assume Coupland intends] Worst. Person. Ever. to be some sort of critique of mass culture. But if this book is satirical, it hides it well… Through total immersion in the banality it purports to expose, his new novel out-sarcasms itself. Like Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff, it's determined to gross you out, offering a barrage of sexism, homophobia, shit, vomit, sputum, and all the other stuff of adolescent humour. Worst. Person. Ever. can only appeal to people who like to hear women belittled, and everything trashed… There is racism here, and mockery of the old, the fat, the sick, the malformed and the ugly – but none of that nears the incessant quality of the book's misogyny."

"There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn't be written. Some to

protect the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In

Morrissey's case, he has managed both. This is a book that cries out

like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to

start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid

of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential

firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it

in Penguin Classics doesn't diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it

just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by

the self-regard of its victim."

"Outdoing even The Little Friend, famously a decade in the writing,

The Goldfinch has taken 11 years to appear. These epic gestations are

attributed by awed Tartt admirers and devotees of websites such as

Donna Tartt Shrine to uncompromising perfectionism. 'It's because of

perfectionism that man walked on the moon and painted the Sistine

Chapel, OK? Perfectionism is good,' she has stressed. But it's hard to

spot much of it in this ineptly put-together book… no amount of

straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The

Goldfinch is a turkey."

"Le Carré affects, as so often, to be making daring revelations about How Things Really Work. In the clever process, he stretches his thrills with mixed clichés, idiosyncratic phrases (can people "go faint at the knees"?) and witless dialogue whaleboned with "he retorted stiffly" and the like."

"Let's concede that The Luminaries is a stunning feat of construction.

The Booker judges knew, whatever else its merits, they were giving the

prize to a tremendously technically accomplished piece of work. I

suspect some exhausted reviewers praised it for the same reason. It

doesn't necessarily make it any good, of course. A ship made of

matchsticks in a bottle is a feat of construction but not necessarily

a great work of art."

"The rhetoric is so offensive and plain bizarre to anyone making her

or his life in 'Africa' that I had no option but to pretend that we

were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel

with a deliberately unlikeable narrator … this is a book I would

recommend only as a teaching aid or to someone interested in tracking

the final sub-Conradian wreckage of a genre, rusting away like the

hulks of tanks that so fascinate the narrator along the roads in

Angola. It is imbued not just with the narrator's old age but the

senescence of an entire genre."