It's not often I agree with Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Indeed I may never have agreed with him before. That is not the only reason I now register a point on which I am happy to find myself on the same side of the fence as he is. In a feature in the Spectator in which various people nominate the literary greats they hate, Wheatcroft picks out The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Oh, the joy of confirmation. This is a book that people rave about; some even profess to read it every year. Wheatcroft can't 'see the point of the book at all'. My own encounter with it produced a similar reaction, and after reading the scholarly introduction to my edition of the novel, in which someone took up every feature of it that had irritated me and presented it as a virtue, I wrote this by way of a tongue-in-cheek response.
However... you must not listen to the dissing of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Anthony Powell and Crime and Punishment that you will find under the same link. I mean, some things are beyond argument.
