Book excerpt: The successor to the highly-praised collection of Christopher Rickss The Force of Poetry, this collection of critical essays still attends to poets and poetry: to John Donnes farewells to love, George Crabbes constraints, Hardys readings of history, and Robert Lowell as translator of Racine. But other literary worlds are also appreciated in Essays in Appreciation. Drama: Marlowes Doctor Faustus and the plague. History: the Earl of Clarendon and composition. The novel: Jane Austen and mothering. Victorian lives: E. C. Gaskells Charlotte Bronte, Froudes Carlyle, Hallam Tennysons Tennyson, and George Eliot and her age. Philosophy: J. L. Austin and his art of allusion. Finally, critical questions: literature and the matter of fact, and literary principles against theory; plus two notes on current critical issuesone on talk of the canon, and the other on Empson and political criticism. literary criticism of an intellectual zestfulness which makes everyone else in the field look half asleep The Spectator Ricks's grasp of literary detail is unequalled he has a microscopic eye for distinguishment of shades of meaning, with their bearings on emotional definition Anyone who has a feeling for literature will enjoy Essays in Appreciation. If you have none, here are good reasons to cultivate it. Times Literary Supplement