The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. Readers of my book are asked to keep an eye on the datelines which end these pieces, for they span nearly 30 years. Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You proceed by quotation.
Quotation is the reviewer's only hard evidence.
Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue. Yet quotation is all we have. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches.