Lord Gnome's literary companion

His review has got to be 'in' by mid-day tomorrow ... At about 9 pm his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit ... skipping expertly through one book after another and laying each down with the comment, 'God, what tripe!' ... Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases - 'a book that no one should miss', 'something memorable on every page' - jump into their places like iron fillings obeying the magnet. Thus did George Orwell, writing forty years ago in Confessions of a Book Reviewer, describe the labours of a typical literary hack. Judging by the incestuous stew of debts and allegiances that dominates today's world of books, precious little has changed over the intervening decades. The servility of reviewers continues to counterpoint the vanity of authors and the greed of their publishers. Yet within this society of mutual admiration, lazy writing and genuflection to established hierarchy, one repository of fearless literary criticism stands out: the 'Literary Review' section of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Lord Gnome's Literary Companion assembles, in thematic order, the best of these columns to present an astringent, rude a