As the distinguished critic Samuel Hynes says about Britain after 1918, "The gap in history [introduced by the war] had entered post-war consciousness as a truth about the modern world".
Here, for example, is the distinguished critic Sir Maurice Bowra, writing in 1943 on the duties and entitlements of the poet – a "shaman", he insists, who is "no longer a man among men" but instead "in touch with some superior order of things".
A decade and a half ago, the distinguished critic William Gass fulminated against the whole genre in a scathing Harper's essay, in which he asked, rhetorically, whether there were "any motives for the enterprise that aren't tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification?
The distinguished critic Robert Boyers, who found his fictional voice at fifty, is indebted to the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, because of his poet wife's connection to her.
Barnes's predilection was for Renoir's "late" period – those fleshy, soft-focus nudes which, to put it mildly, haven't aged well – and Phil Grabsky's film deserves points for tackling the issue head-on: distinguished art critics queue up to explain how "weird" and "strange" they find them.
And if the letter writer who had heard of none of my choices would even care to know, I recently met a distinguished European critic who also happened to be writing a 100 best list for his newspaper.
In this compelling follow-up to his 1993 book, "Race Matters," West, right, a Princeton professor of religion and distinguished social critic, identifies three threats to American democracy: "free-market fundamentalism," "aggressive militarism" and "escalating authoritarianism".
Just published and being reviewed at the moment is a book by this country's most distinguished living literary critic, Frank Kermode.
