I owe someone a link for putting me in touch with this, but for the life of me I cannot recall how I found this essay first thing this morning. Oh yes I do. The New York Times sent me their daily email, and I clicked on the piece. Oh well. Anyway, it's Clive James defending nasty reviews in his usual (i.e. highly readable) way.

Adverse book reviews there have always been, and always should be, lest a tide of good intentions rise to drown us all in worthy sludge.

Indeed.

In my own experience, dishing out grief has been a lot more fun than taking it. As a trainee critic, I was sometimes careless of the personal feelings of authors whose books I reviewed, and I simultaneously found, when I myself published a book, that my adverse reviewers were invariably careless of mine. Though I never grew thick skin (thin skin, after all, is what a writer is in business to have), I gradually got better at taking punishment. By no coincidence, I also grew more reluctant to inflict it. Anyway, personal attacks rarely work. They tend to arouse sympathy for the victim, and might even help sell the book. Legitimately destructive reviews, however, I both continued to write and grew resigned to receiving. They are part of the game.

Quite so.

But there's a catch. Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?

As the man says in the current Foster's advert, of the bungy jumper whose head gets bitten off by a crocodile: "That's gotta hurt son."

But there must be nasty reviews if we are not all going to have our brains chewed off by that rising tide of worthy sludge. So to speak.

Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him.

Exactly. When you encounter a river meandering level with its fount, you have to put the boot in, and just so as there's no misunderstanding, I well realise that I mixed that metaphor, not Clive James. He merely put the components next to each other on his literary pallet, as he is quite entitled to do. I was the one who put them in the blender and knitted them together into a new display of verbal fireworks.

I love mixed metaphors, and I quite agree that mixed or muddled metaphors are a sign of bad writing. Deliberately blending a mixed metaphor is different.