![]() ![]() Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form.’ The French literary scholar Pierre Bayard devoted a whole book to this idea in 2007. Oscar Wilde elaborated on the same idea in his dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’ in 1891, where he lets one of his characters pronounce that: ‘It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. ![]() As the 18th-century satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg observed, ‘one of the greatest recent inventions of the human mind is the art of judging books without having read them’. Ignorance can have its merits, not least for readers and critics of books. Royal Museum of Arts, Antwerp/Wiki Commons. Hercules Protects Painting from Ignorance and Envy, Andries Cornelis Lens c.1763. ![]()
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