Know Your Enemy #27

“The section of his brain that dishes out adverse criticism seems to have shut down. The book is relentlessly eulogistic. Not a single fault is found with anything Dylan says or writes from start to finish … It remains extraordinarily unfunny, and when you try to work out why, you realise that it is because it is saying all the time ‘I am cleverer than you’. Successful humorists are careful to avoid that message. Ricks belts it out fortissimo.

Sunday Times critic John Carey on Christopher Ricks’s new study of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, ‘Dylan’s Visions Of Sin’. Carey’s tone is sniffily snobbish, but, whether right or wrong, his demolition job makes for great reading. Book reviews are often dull, anodyne, backslapping affairs, but every once in a while they can be really barbed, cutting and downright nasty.