Critics have been around since there have been books and plays - and they have not always been liked. In the 17th century, the poet-diplomat Sir Henry Wotton was already saying: “Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.”

But it was in the years after the Napoleonic wars, with its explosion of newspapers and magazines, that critics first became widely read. The star of these was William Hazlitt, the first critic to make his living by journalism. Virginia Woolf adored his writing, in which, she said, “sentence followed sentence with the healthy ring and chime of the blacksmith's hammer”.

In the mid-19th century, the outstanding critic was Matthew Arnold, who thought that literature would replace religion and philosophy - athough at the same time his fellow poet Alfred Lord Tennyson was calling critics “lice in the locks of literature”.

The great century of criticism was the 20th - especially its second half. Before the Second World War, T.S. Eliot had set a new standard of critical seriousness and grace in his essays, while I.A. Richards launched an era of close attention to the writers' exact words that became known as the New Criticism. William Empson (above) wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity, which teased an astounding wealth of meaning out of a few words.

After the war the dominating figure was the Cambridge don F. R Leavis whose book The Great Tradition set a new standard for “felt life” and moral seriousness in novels by nominating Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James as the greatest.

But he was followed by too many of what I used to call “little Leavisites” who parroted his severity but lacked his wisdom. The leading newspaper critics at that time were Cyril Connolly, the anti-Leavisite

and savourer of refined pleasure in books, and Kenneth Tynan, champion of the new “angry” theatre. For a time, there was almost a feeling that good literary criticism was going to save the world.

Then came a wave of French critics, such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, who thought in Marxist mode that writers were just the unconscious voice of their class, or that the words of a “text” could mean whatever the reader liked.

Since then criticism has lost all its bearings. There is no dominating critic or set of ideas now. Excellent critics such as Christopher Ricks and Frank Kermode go on pursuing their own course - and who knows if some younger critic such as James Wood may not go on to build a school of his own?

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