Will Self on Julie Burchill’s Unchosen

“I can’t really dignify her latest offering with the ascription ‘book’, nor the contents therein as ‘writing’ – rather they are sophomoric, hammy effusions, wrongheaded, rancorous and pathetically self-aggrandising.” Will Self’s review of Julie Burchill’s Unchosen brands it a “repugnant gallimaufry of insults and half-baked nonsense”, which insists her enemies are “all pals together” – an egregious error that Self suggests is “wrong, deeply unhelpful and an attitude that, in my view, could lead ultimately to the destruction of Israel”.

John Gibson Lockhart on John Keats’s Endymion

Byron posited that Keats was “snuffed out by an Article” in Don Juan. If such a thing were possible, then this review might have done it. “As for Mr Keats’s Endymion, it has just as much to do with Greece as it has with ‘old Tartary the fierce’; no man, whose mind has ever been imbued with the smallest knowledge or feeling of classical poetry or classical history, could have stooped to profane and vulgarise every association in the manner which has been adopted by this ‘son of promise’”, ran the Blackwood’s review. “We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50 quid upon any thing he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,’ &c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.”

Anonymous review in The Critic of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

“We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce,” wrote The Critic’s anonymous reviewer in 1855. “We had become stoically indifferent to her Woolly Horses, her Mermaids, her Sea Serpents, her Barnums and her Fanny Ferns, but the last monstrous importation from Brooklyn, New York, has scattered our indifference to the winds ... We should have passed over this book, Leaves of Grass, with indignant contempt, had not some few Transatlantic critics attempted to ‘fix’ this Walt Whitman as the poet who shall give a new and independent literature to America – who shall form a race of poets as Banquo’s issue formed a line of kings. Is it possible that the most prudish nation in the world will adopt a poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? ... Walt Whitman is, as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics. His poems – we must call them so for convenience – 12 in number, are innocent of rhythm, and resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians.”

Dorothy Parker on AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner

Dorothy Parker took an unforgettable approach to AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner in the New Yorker, starting with a quote from the book. “‘Well, you’ll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it snows, tiddely-pom-’ ‘Tiddely what’ said Piglet. (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.) ‘Pom,’ said Pooh. ‘I put that to make it more hummy.’ And it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

James Lorimer on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Among the baffled praise in contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights, Lorimer’s piece in the North British Review stands out, attributing to it “all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) ... magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read”. But this scorn is more than matched by the anonymous reviewer in Paterson’s Magazine: “We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we had come fresh from a pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights ...”