Axing the hatchet job

Literary critic Houman Barekat on the rumoured death of the negative book review

In 1946, George Orwell wrote that only a handful of books in any given year will be truly brilliant

Every once in a while, someone notices that book reviews aren’t what they used to be. Unherd lamented ‘The dying art of the hatchet job’ in a 2021 think-piece, and in 2023 the Economist claimed that ‘Critics are getting less cruel. Alas’.. Note the present participles: this has been the case for most of our century, but it’s still being experienced as a relatively recent turn. It’s almost a decade since the author and critic D.J. Taylor remarked, in a New Statesman article on ‘The Death of the Hatchet Job’, that reviewing ‘has turned horribly emollient, to the point where it sometimes seems that books are not so much criticised, favourably or unfavourably, as simply endorsed.’ Little has changed since then, and in 2025 we can safely say it’s not a trend: it’s just the state of things.

Taylor cut his journalistic teeth in the 1980s and early ’90s, which was something of a boom time for books and arts coverage. With abundant page space and generous remuneration, reviewers enjoyed the freedom to be forthright, combative and sometimes even downright rude, in a way that wouldn’t fly today. That era is gone, but its long afterlife in the collective cultural memory shaped a generation of younger critics who entered the fray expecting one thing, and found quite another. They (OK: we) found solace, and intellectual validation, in an almost MAGA-like nostalgia for the invigorating stridency of yesteryear.