THE POWER OF DELIGHT: Essays 1962–2002

Bayley is best known as the late Iris Murdoch's devoted husband, but for most of his life, he has also been a professor and literary critic in his own right. This extensive collection of criticism attests to the breadth of his knowledge, his range of interests and his generosity as a reader of the great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this volume, Bailey proves himself endlessly curious—as he notes in the introduction, he learned to read Russian in order to read Pushkin, and then went on to tackle Tolstoy, Akhmatova and the rest. In the majority of these essays—most culled from the New York Review of Books , the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement —Bayley revisits a single writer's life and oeuvre. Selected by Carey, the New Yorker' s literary editor, the essays are arranged chronologically according to the writers' births rather than when the pieces were written. The result minimizes the developments in Bayley's attitudes and style, but that's a small price to pay for such erudite and enthusiastic considerations of literature. (Mar.)