By The Book

From The New York Times interview with Clive James:

My best bad review, as it were, was a takedown of “Princess Daisy,” an appalling best-selling novel by the once-famous Judith Krantz, who clearly believed every word she wrote about sex, glamour and the higher levels of shopping. But I was careful to pay her the compliment of saying that I had found her book unputdownable, although I might have said the same about a pot of glue. My best good reviews were mainly about Philip Larkin; it was a privilege to be in a position to call him a great poet. After he died and he started to be denigrated as a racist and misogynist, I took several opportunities to say that his prejudices were a private matter and that he had never even dreamed of expressing them in public, least of all in his poetry. Spraying cold water on a witch hunt is one of the duties that a critic should be ready to perform.