Only in the rarest cases, for example Coleridge, Randall Jarrell, Christopher Ricks when he steers clear of the subject of Bob Dylan, does one expect to derive aesthetic bliss from the work of a literary critic, but that is what James Wood delivers, in abundance. He is before anything else a superb writer. A young man - he was born in 1965, for God's sake - he already seems to have read everything worth reading. In this collection he writes with passion and profound insight on figures as diverse as Sir Thomas More - "A man for one season" - Melville, Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, Martin Amis, Matthew Arnold, Philip Roth, T.S Eliot, Julian Barnes - whose ears must still be ringing from the sound boxing given them by Wood - and many others. He is that rare, if not unique, phenomenon, a modern critic deeply concerned with the numinous, though his concern is firmly fixed in the human sphere of God's activity. In an epigraph he quotes to good effect a line from Ruskin, which speaks of his essays "bringing everything to a root in human passion or human hope". The Broken Estate is one of the finest and most exciting works of literary criticism of recent years.