It is, however, the other subjects covered in this new collection that will grab the serious reader’s attention. James is surely right to say that there are essayists who can be ‘faithful to the world’s multiplicity even when they are writing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and others ‘who can’t report a war-crimes trial without writing flummery’. But some things are more important than others, and the Metropolitan Critic of old is now a political voice to be reckoned with. While the book contains essays on The West Wing and The Sopranos, it is to the evils of recent history that James has increasingly turned his attention. The emphasis is by no means new: From the Land of Shadows (1982) most probably marks the beginning of the shift from critic to political man of letters. But here, in reviews of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist or two new biographies of Primo Levi, the ghetto and the gas chamber weigh more heavily than ever. Facing them is a moral imperative – one ignored by many intellectuals. One of the finest things in the book is a review of the letters of Isaiah Berlin, whom James sees as having overlooked Nazism largely because its driving irrationality does not lend itself to the history of ideas. ‘A Nightclub in Bali’ is equally powerful – part obituary for the murdered revellers, part rejoinder to those who imagine that the murderers are moist-eyed anti-imperialists attempting to avenge the wretched of the earth, all of whose woes are self-evidently reducible to US support for Israel. It’s not just the vices of liberal democracy that the bearded, boring clerics hate: it is, says James, the virtues, too. This is incisive political stuff. To adapt his own assessment of Levi: ‘Dreadful grist, but a brilliant mill.’

Just what a brilliant mill it is could be demonstrated by quoting one or two sentences from almost any page of this book. Not one sentence comes down with a bump, and yet every word is pulling its weight: nothing is added for reasons of sonority. (Not that the prose isn’t sonorous, of course: towards the end of the third instalment of his Unreliable Memoirs, James wrote: ‘All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.’ Note how he demonstrates the point while making it.) The voice is the one we know and love: diffident, amorous, aphoristic. Essential to James’s style is his humour, which is, as he says, a form of compression. The final piece in the book is hilarious, the jokes at President Bush’s expense quite on a par with his famous description of the current governor of California as a brown condom full of walnuts. ‘When he searches for a word, he feels fear, and his face shows it. When he finds one, he feels triumph, and his face shows that. Almost always, the word he finds is the wrong one, but his look of relief arouses sympathy in the audience, as when a child, sent to fetch a spoon from the kitchen drawer, comes back with a fork.’

The question of style is by no means peripheral to the question of what one does with it. Style is the physiognomy of the soul, ‘a spine and a brain, not just a skin’. In prose, as in the other arts, the relationship between content and form is the key. ‘The fictional West Wing is realistic, but only in the sense of reminding you that realism is the most refined form of manufacture.’ Art is artificial: that’s what makes it art. Over the years, James the critic has evolved a set of aesthetic principles, one of which is that the apparent obstacle is often the departure point for inspiration. Applied in the past to poetic form, acrylic paints and swearing bans, here it is pressed into service again to explain the appeal of Bing Crosby’s voice: ‘Too much aural beauty, indeed, can get in the way, flooding the aural reception system of the listener before the actual song gets a chance to register’; as well as the achievement of Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘Without the fierce requirements of rhyme, his wit would never have been driven to its dizzy height, just as, without the burden of his nose, he would never have been compelled to the nobility of his sacrifice.’

If James can be said to have mellowed at all, it is probably in his attitude to academia. Slowly but surely he has come to realise that the distance from Grub Street to the Ivory Tower is not so great as he once thought: the Republic of Letters boasts many professors – Frank Kermode and John Carey among them – who know the way and can show you the shortcuts. James, however, is as ruthless as ever when it comes to exposing academic folly of the kind exhibited by Professor Christopher Ricks. Of Ricks’s assertion that the later Yeats was more rhetorician than poet, he is as scathing as one might hope and expect. Ricks, he suggests, could have reached his opinion ‘only after a small asteroid had passed through his brain, perhaps while he was listening to Bob Dylan’.

Australia figures larger in this book than in any of James’s previous collections. ‘The Meaning of Recognition’, the title-piece on Philip Hodgins, first appeared in ABR (September 2003). ‘A Memory Called Malouf’ is particularly fine. (‘For any Australian who first went swimming at the end of World War II, the matted board will have the same effect as a truck full of madeleines would have had on Proust.’) Whether writing about the Australian essay or reviewing the state of Australian poetry, James doesn’t need an invitation to point out that, culturally, we have little to cringe about. He doesn’t have to say it, of course. He proves it each time he puts pen to paper.