Forty years of John Bayley's book reviews have given us a book almost too rich to review. Where to start? Bayley himself at one point conjures the threat of “reviewer's terror, a well-known complaint like athlete's foot.” Tell me about it, mutters the reviewer's reviewer. There are more than six hundred pages in the book, and after reading it this reviewer finds that he has made almost four hundred notes. Every reviewer knows that, for a thousand word review, a mere ten notes are enough to induce paralysis. So either this is going to be a forty thousand word review, or there will have to be a winnowing. It could start with a mass crossing-out of all the phrases and sentences transcribed merely because they are excellent.