This enormous book weighs nearly two kilograms and is roughly the size of a telephone directory. Its bulk makes reading it in bed, or on the bus, or anywhere except at a desk, problematic. It is published under a highly respected and prestigious academic imprint, and the author is professor of poetry at Glasgow University and writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge. But in tone and approach this book is hardly academic. There are, perhaps mercifully, no footnotes; and its judgements are often delivered without much careful argument; and the breadth of the survey is refreshingly free from academic constraints. The blurb talks about the novel in English, which brings in, naturally enough, Commonwealth, Irish and American authors. But if that were not enough, we have length