This book was originally to be called The Gentle Art of Book Reviewing. As it took shape, Anthony Curtis -- a former Literary Editor of two national newspapers -- found himself describing the passion, tact, politics and imagination needed to keep open that crucial section of a newspaper which public crises and advertising seem to crowd out. For thirty years he fought for his space, his contributors and his readers. On what grounds does a Lit Ed select books and assign them? How does he deal with difficult publishers, contributors and editors? How can he do justice to fiction? Where can he find, and how retain, a `star reviewer' to set the tone of the page?

Curtis goes back to the start of the century, piecing together an account of how Lit Ed-ing has developed in Britain and the United States. He explores the Times Literary Supplement, The New Age, The Athenaeum, New Statesman, Listener, the New Yorker, Partisan Review and others. He recalls fellow literary editors such as J.W.Lambert of the Sunday Times and Terence Kilmartin of the Observer, his contemporaries, and reviewers including Rebecca West, Nigel Dennis and C.P.Snow, with whom he worked closely. He also takes account of the example of Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, Harold Nicolson, Philip Toynbee, Dorothy Parker, Clifton Fadiman, Edwin Muir, John Raymond, John Updike and others. By turns memoir, meditation and history, Lit Ed is continuously readable: warts and all, it takes us into the heart of the system of reputation-making which writers at once court and fear.